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Abstract
Ezra Pound’s call to ‘Make It New’ spoke a sense of compositional immediacy to his literary contemporaries by way of an ancient motto: the inscription the ancient Shang Dynasty Emperor Ch’eng T’ang (1766–1753 BCE) made on the side of his bathtub and immortalised more than a thousand years later in the Confucian Da Xue (The Great Learning): 薪 日 日 薪 (xin ri ri xin). This is a timely phrase: Modernism Studies, like many areas of literary work, faces extraordinary challenges and opportunities in the digital shift taking place at the levels of textual studies, literary interpretation and literary theory. Pound’s call for a cultural rinascimento demands not only that writers learn from the fullest range of venerable sources and traditions in the course of literary experimentation, but also that their readers sharpen an awareness as to how material forms of inscription directly shape the identity and meaning of texts. This challenge cuts across recent work in textual and manuscript studies, particularly in the representation of complex Modernist texts and their manuscripts (for example the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project).
Notes
1. Jerome J McGann notes that Pound’s reaction again Victorian poetry was qualified by his admiration for the late-nineteenth-century revolution in printing embodied in the artisanal Kelmscott Press and the Bodley Head, which was a very ‘modern’ concern. Drawing on these influences, Pound had illuminated capitals made up for the first three instalments of The Cantos – these were designed by Henry Strater for A Draft of XVI Cantos (Three Mountains Press, Paris, 1925), by Gladys Hines for A Draft of Cantos 17–27 (John Rodker, London, 1928) and by Dorothy Shakespeare for A Draft of XXX Cantos (Hours Press, Paris, 1930). McGann sees a materialist hermeneutic at work in these compositional choices: ‘The graphic representation of Pound’s books thus made an index of their aims’, where ‘[t]hrough book design Pound makes an issue of language’s physique, deliberateness, and historicality’, in Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993, p. 80.
2. Pound first cites this phrase in Canto LIII: ‘T’ching prayed on the mountain and/wrote MAKE IT NEW/on his bath tub/Day by day make it new.’ The text includes the four characters running down the right-hand side of the page, themselves glossed by standard Wade-Giles transliterations (‘hsin1/jih4/jih4/hsin1’): Ezra Pound, The Cantos, 15th printing, New Directions, New York, 1996, p. 265. All subsequent quotations from The Cantos are from this edition and refer to Canto and page number: for example, LIII/265. Pound cites all or part of the formula elsewhere in The Cantos in various combinations of English, French, Wade-Giles transliteration and Chinese characters: LIV/278; LXXXVII/591; XCIII/649; XCIV/662; XCVII/695; XCVIII/704; and, CX/800. The iconic force of this phrase for Pound is evident in his decision to use it as the title for a book of his most philologically rigorous essays on Troubadour poetry, Guido Cavalcanti, Elizabethan classicism, French poets and Henry James: see Ezra Pound, Make It New, Faber and Faber, London, 1934. The phrase appears in large Chinese characters below the title on the book’s title page.
3. This imperative bears relation to what McGann and DF McKenzie identify as the traditional role of philology, where ‘documents carry the evidence of “the history of their own making”’: Jerome J McGann, ‘Why Digital Scholarship Matters; or, Philology in a New Key’, in Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, p. 274.
4. Jerome J McGann, The Textual Condition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991, p. 13.
5. McGann, ‘Why Digital Scholarship Matters’, p. 275.
6. Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders, ‘Introduction: Textual Scholarship in the Age of Media Consciousness’, in Fraistat and Flanders, p. 1.
7. McGann, ‘Why Digital Textual Scholarship Matters’, p. 277.
8. These notes have now been transcribed and extensively annotated in Chapter 3, ‘The Missing Book of the Trilogy’, of Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Bloomsbury, London, 2014, pp. 113–206.
9. Christian Vandendorpe addresses this paradox in digital texts – of the rhetoric of liberty, on the one hand, and the reality of highly organised and programmed decision structures on the other – in From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward a Universal Digital Library, Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (trans), University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2009. See especially ‘Aporias of Hyperfiction’, pp. 82–6.
10. Vandendorpe refers to discontinuous text as tabular: whether the Barthesian or Benjaminian collection of fragments in codex form, or the structures of early hypertext fictions such as Michael Joyce’s Afternoon or Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope. Vandendorpe overstates the difference between fragments in print and in the digital medium – the latter existing as a ‘pure atoll of meaning’ (p. 144). At the same time, print fragments may still be assembled into a cognitive, readerly whole, whereas a digital tabular text structure obviates a text ‘whole’ and induces a necessarily segmented reading experience.
11. In 1997 Gail MacDonald and Ned Bates attempted to model The Cantos for digital representation in their project ‘Kybernekyia: Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI as Hypervortext’, the webpage for which no longer exists. Kent Emerson of the University of Tulsa has created a digital timeline of Pound’s Cantos, available at the blog page <http://kentemerson.wordpress.com/digital-projects/ezra-pounds-cantos-project/>, accessed 10 June 2014. Roxana Preda is currently coordinating a digital Cantos annotation project under the auspices of the Ezra Pound Society: see <http://www.ezrapoundsociety.org/index.php/the-cantos-project>, accessed 10 June 2014.
12. Timothy Materer, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1995, p. 29.
13. Paul Eggert, ‘The Book, the E-text and the “Work-site”’, in Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (eds), Text Editing: Print and the Digital World, Ashgate, Farnham and Binghamton, VT, 2009, p. 81.
14. Vandendorpe, p. 38.
15. John Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, p. 8.
16. ibid., p. 8, emphasis in original.
17. Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1989, p. 41.
18. Gangolf Schrimpf, Das Werk des Johannes Scottus Eriugena im Rahmen des Wissenschaftverständnisses seiner Zeit: Eine Hinführung zu Periphyseon, Aschendorff, Münster, 1982, p. 39.
19. Marenbon, p. 97.
20. John J O’Meara, ‘Eriugena’s Immediate Influence’, in Werner Beierwaltes (ed.), Eriugena Redivivus, Carl Winter, Heidelberg, 1987, p. 16.
21. Marenbon, p. 104.
22. ibid., p. 104.
23. To these early florilegia might be added two twelfth-century manuscripts: the edition produced at Malmesbury by several scribal hands that came into William’s possession and is now housed at Trinity College Cambridge (Trin. Coll. 0.5.20); and Clavis physicae, an important if flawed liber excerptus by Honorius Augustodunensis, a modern edition of which Paolo Lucentini has prepared.
24. McGann, The Textual Condition, p. 107.
25. Several scholars have addressed Pound’s intermittent citation of medieval textual practices, although not systematically. For an early example, in the first number of Paideuma, see William Chase, ‘The Canto as Cento: XXXIII’, Paideuma, vol. 1, no. 1, 1972, pp. 89–100.
26. Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Carmina, Michael W. Herren (ed.), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin, 1993, p. 140.
27. Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2006, p. 86.
28. McGann, The Textual Condition, p. 107.
29. ibid., p. 137.
30. Such was the influence of Averroes upon subsequent scholastic philosophy that Thomas Aquinas simply called him ‘The Commentator’, in counterpoint to Aristotle as ‘The Philosopher’. Averroes also appears in the first circle of hell in Canto 4 of Dante’s Inferno along with the classical poets and philosophers, as well as in Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens, housed in the Stanza della Signatura in the Vatican Museum.
31. McGann, The Textual Condition, p. 118.
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Notes on contributors
Mark Byron
Mark Byron is Senior Lecturer in Modern British and American Literature at the University of Sydney. He teaches and publishes across the genres and practices of Modernism: prose, poetry, drama, and film, as well as textual and editorial theory. His current work is in developing digital scholarly editions of complex Modernist texts and their manuscripts, including the Watt module of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. His work also deals with critical and theoretical reflection upon scholarly editing techniques. He is the author of Ezra Pound's Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).