grimy, or perhaps I should say, a rosy, ®oribund bore. (Literary Es-
says 400)And again, this time in his essay on the musician Arnold Dolmetsch:
What I call emotional, or impressionist music, starts with being emo-
tion or impression and then becomes only approximately music. It
is, that is to say, something in terms of something else. (Literary Es-
says 434)Something in terms of something else: Impressionism, Pound suggests, is a
mode still wedded to metaphor; the artists and poets in question failed to re-
alize that the natural object is always the adequate symbol, that, for example,
“a hawk is a hawk” (Literary Essays 9). Just as Duchamp wanted to escape
from the discourse of painting, where color always “stood for” something
else, so Pound came to rely on the juxtaposition of proper names—names
that were almost but never quite the same. “The infra-thin separation,” writes
Thierry de Duve apropos of Duchamp, “is working at its maximum when it
distinguishes the same from the same, when it is an indifferent difference, or
a differential identity” (Pictorial Nominalism 160). And he cites Duchamp’s
note: “The difference (dimensional) between 2 mass-produced objects [from
the same mold] is an infra thin when the maximum (?) precision is obtained”
(Matisse, Notes #18).
This “maximum precision” is what Pound has in mind in The Cantos
when he speci¤es those Paris restaurants, Verona churches, and characters
from Dante’s Purgatorio, placing these names and those of old friends in jux-
taposition with the “cakeshops on the Nevsky.” Indeed, it is the “infra-thin
difference between... objects from the same mold” that gives Pound’s prop-
erties their curious authenticity, their sense of being there. Like the citizens
of the Large Glass, they take on a life of their own—“prime words divisible
only by themselves.”
Such nominalism, we should note, creates its own distortions. Pound may
well have believed that his naming was in accord with the chêng ming, the
“recti¤cation of names” advocated by Confucius, but the fact is that he
nominalizes concepts and categories when it suits his design. Take the lines
from Canto 74, which serves as my epigraph:
but Wanjina is, shall we say, Ouan Jin
or the man with an educationPound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 57