The likeness to Benjamin's Arcades project is intriguing, but The Cantos are
organised by a quite different method. 'They say they [the details] are
chosen at random', Pound said, 'But that's not the way it is.  It's music,
musical themes that find each other out.'  Trying to get your head around
that will be more useful than blowing it up with theory.

Your other thread is not really separate.  My quarrel with 'Theory' as it
has infected US and UK academics, especially those who profess to study
literature, has nothing to do with its being French in origin.  The French
generally have the philosophical training needed to handle it.  As
reproduced -- note the word -- by too many UK and US academics 'Theory'
vitiates thought and disempowers intelligence. It disempowers the literary
intelligence in particular.  You can't read texts and you can't read your
world when you are applying the questions and the answers 'Theory' has laid
down for you.  There's also the mental fog from the theorists writing no
language.   The hegemony of theory in the humanities has been a major
betrayal and a cultural disaster, disabling clever young minds from engaging
critically and constructively with what's actually going on in the world.

To learn, by exacting and discriminating attention, what is actually going
in The Cantos -- to make out the light (and the dark) in the detail and then
the musical organisation -- would be a more relevant training for making
sense, let us say, of the daily unfolding tragedy.   Some proper
philosophical training would help too.

David Moody



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon & Anne Weidler" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 2:07 PM
Subject: Benjamin & Pound


> I've lately found myself thinking of the Cantos, particularly about the
> ways they "blast" loose the luminous details as Pound saw them.  His
> method is extremely idiosyncratic, as anyone notices reading the poem,
 . . . . . . . .
>. . . . . .  Trying to understand the relation between the
> homogenous time of history and the "phalanx of particulars" that EP
> blasts out of that continuum brought me to thinking of Walter Benjamin
> and his Arcades Project.  Benjamin did something sort of similar to the
> Cantos, though much more locally, about 19th century Paris.  There are
> (of course) innumerable documents about Paris in those days in the
> Bibliotheque Nationale, and Benjamin selected a large number of them to
> take notes from, trying to arrange them montage-style into a
> study-guide of sorts>
> . . . . . .. . .
> Similar to the Cantos, no
> formal, sequential attempt is made to narrate how one gets from 1820 to
> 1880: instead, perceptive readers are equipped with the stepping
> stones, arranged in no fixed order.  They, the readers, aren't to
> reconstruct Benjamin's line of thought, but are to do something else,
> something more pedagogical.  So: Benjamin as teacher, Pound as teacher.
>   Both modernists, both montagists, both present a guidebook to history,
> if history is something we understand as having gone through the
> blender.
>
> -Jon
>