à trois days during the war, Bernstein complains that the personal reference
trivializes rather than intensi¤es the Confucian historiography that precedes
it (Tale of the Tribe 45–46).
But there is another way of regarding Pound’s seeming failure to sustain
his vision. My own sense is that however much Pound yearned to believe in
Confucian and neo-Platonic doctrine, his own bent was toward a nominal-
ism that ironically nourished his long poem much more successfully than he
himself might have imagined. Indeed, whereas the invocation of the resplen-
dent light could yield brief epiphanic moments of lyric intensity, they could
hardly sustain an encyclopedic poem, written over half a century, as could
Pound’s particular brand of nominalism.
For the medieval Scholastics, nominalism was the doctrine that “denies
the existence of abstract objects and universals, holding that these are not
required to explain the signi¤cance of words apparently referring to them.
Nominalism holds that all that really exists are particular, usually physical
objects, and that properties, numbers, and sets (for instance) are not further
things in the world, but merely features of our way of thinking or speaking
about those things that do exist.”^15 Thus de¤ned, nominalism is not simply
equivalent to empiricism, for it takes the particulars in question not as so
much material data but as discrete and unique bearers of meaning. It is the
relation of particular to the “essence” beyond it that is questioned. What
makes Pound a nominalist is his peculiar ¤xation on the uniqueness of a
given word or object, its haeccitas, its difference from all other words or ob-
jects. Such “thisness,” we should note, is not necessarily a matter of the con-
crete image. Indeed, the language of The Cantos is hardly “concrete” in the
sense of “visual” or “descriptive.” There is, for example, nothing in Pound to
match William Carlos Williams’s graphic tactility in “Queen Anne’s Lace”
and “Young Sycamore,” or Wallace Stevens’s color imagery in “Sea Surface
Full of Clouds.” Indeed, in Jean-Michel Rabaté’s words, Pound’s “montage
of quotations forces a whirl of details, particular objects, points of interest,
clashes of utterances onto the reader,” so that direct reference is curiously
undercut. “The real is not given ‘in’ the text—it remains outside.... it with-
holds itself as sign, the transparency looked for vanishes as soon as the op-
eration of reading and of writing has begun.”^16
It is this subtle oscillation between “reference and reverence” (Rabaté’s
phrase) that gives The Cantos their distinctive cast. The drive to turn the
signi¤er—the found object, citation, or proper name—into that which it
signi¤es relates Pound’s work to that of a fellow artist who, on the face of it,
would seem to have precious little in common with him except that he was
Pound’s exact contemporary—namely, Marcel Duchamp.^17 The two were
casual acquaintances—¤rst through their mutual friendship with François
44 Chapter 3