- 1 From the holograph notebook for the Selected Prose and assorted notes. This page was dated (down to (...)
- 2 For dedicated volumes see Bush, Genesis; Froula, To Write Paradise; Rainey, Poem Containing History (...)
1In recent years, critics have directed a good deal of attention to the status of the text of The Cantos, and to the process of its composition.2 The Cantos—a poem including history—has equally come to be labelled a poem including bibliogra-phy. The composition history of the text has much to tell us about its layout and the various idiosyncrasies of its presentation. In his book The Textual Condition, Jerome McGann describes it as a kind of critical edition in its aims and -subject matter: “A twentieth-century poem containing history will have to invent and display, somehow, at least the equivalent of footnotes, bibliography, and other scholarly apparatus” (129). In this way, The Cantos could be said to be a poem including the history of its own bibliography. Jean-Michel Rabaté has also commented on this archiving function in Pound’s use of reference and quotation:
- 3 The archive would appear to function as an apposite metaphor in this case. However, the text assemb (...)
Pound uses the textual tradition and its accidents in his Cantos in such a way that his radical departure launches the modernist Odyssey as a textual voyage, present-ing the writer as a re-reader and misquoter of a vast array of texts. This gives birth to the modern “textual condition,” which takes its point of departure in errors, repetitions, interpolations which foreground not only textuality, but all the material trappings indispensable to the constitution of an archive. (485)3
2The Pisan Cantos offers a particularly lucid example of this kind of bibliographical information. The unusual conditions of its composition and transmission are well known to us, and it embodies an extreme form of writing in exile. I would like to examine the text of the Pisan Cantos as a culmination of a process of exile in Pound’s work. This exile is the product of Pound’s geographical displacements, prior to his detention in Pisa, and of an internal exile. Writing outside of a stable linguistic and cultural milieu directs Pound’s use of historical material in the Pisan Cantos, and marks out the historically specific text realisation at work.
3In this paper, I wish to address two features of Pound’s text: first, the role of reference with respect to Pound’s historical and philosophical material, and second, the way poetic material is assembled on the page. I hope to show that the kinds of authority Pound seeks in his philosophical sources correlate with his sense of estrangement and exile. In particular, the use of medieval light philosophy in the Pisan Cantos demonstrates the virtue of abstract -authority for Pound: the ego scriptor, exiled, displaced, and eventually imprisoned, could harness this cultural and metaphysical fund without adhering to conventions of reference or the socialisation of thought. The second part of this paper will concentrate on some elements of the irregular and competing forms of the text. I do not wish so much to describe their bibliographical features (which has been done excellently elsewhere) but to show that the provisional and less-than-stable versions of the text are quite in keeping with the status of quoted material in the Pisan Cantos. That is, Pound’s attitude towards his text material, and the force of history in its production, is a history in miniature of exilic modernism (and of text realisation in the twentieth century). I wish to show how the Pisan Cantos is structured by the provisional and evolving notion of textuality. It offers a particularly focussed aspect of the larger picture of The Cantos: the development of textuality, and the loss of textual stability, in the twentieth century.
- 4 The critical view represented by Nicholls is confined to early modernism by other critics. James Lo (...)
4Before dealing with Pound’s philosophical sources, and the assemblage of his text, it is worth examining the notion of exilic modernism that frames them. Critical accounts of modernist exile have ascribed traits of alienation and separateness to the entire character of modernism. Peter Nicholls identifies the source of modernism in French Symbolisme, and specifically the change in tone of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé when writing of urban scenes. The distanced, ironic tone is appropriate to their status as déclassés or disenchanted outsiders, “whose willed estrangement exemplifies a new sense of the incom- patibility between artistic vocation and social obligation” (Nicholls 12-13). This anti-social position “ensures the poet’s separateness from the social world of which he writes” (5).4 Although the déclassé was not necessarily an exile, the mechanisms of internal exile were present. In a related way, Nicholls sees the so-called “Men of 1914” reacting against mass politics of the democratic age, and swiftly reconstituting themselves “as closed, autonomous, and antagonis-tic” (251). In this formulation the self need not be original, and can thus avoid any residual Romanticism by becoming part of a complex cultural tradition.
5From its earliest stages, Pound’s career was punctuated with episodes of conflict resulting in alienation or estrangement. He was dismissed from his first and only academic post as instructor in Romance Languages at Wabash College, Indiana, following some allegedly compromising incidents (Carpenter 76-81); he alienated himself from several editors and publishers, and was stripped of an editorial post at the Dial (429) and resigned from other posts at Poetry magazine and the Little Review (345); and he left both London and Paris in the wake of personal antipathies and professional disappointments. The perceived necessity to flee aesthetic vacuity and narrow-mindedness gave Pound a curious authority to speak of his homeland—and many other subjects besides:
“Especially if exile is the result of contingent political circumstances or self-imposed ideological ones, the victim claims to possess the values of his native place, as it were, in proxy—he is the truer version of the place from which he is barred” (Seidel 9).
6The Pisan Cantos exhibits a type of deep exile only possible in modernist aesthetics. If the emphasis of literary analysis can shift from generic and hermeneutic questions to that of text status, the historically specific nature of exilic modernism becomes clear. The text absorbs and displays the traits of exilic writing developed in other modernist (and earlier) texts, but internalises features of alienation, apparent self-sufficiency and the limits of expression into the structure and provenance of the text itself. This internal exile, whilst part of a larger discourse of exilic writing, manifests a radical change from earlier authorial conventions and practices.
7Pound’s internal exile of the 1930s and during the Second World War shifted the focus of his reading and writing. His interest in economic theory i-ntensified and hardened throughout the decade, finding its way into his infamous radio speeches. The Four Books of the Confucian canon became touchstones of the principles of good government, but with their authority steeped in metaphysics. Pound also returned to the philosophy he read and wrote about in the 1920s—neo-Platonism and the cultic sources of Cavalcanti’s amor. He also began serious research into medieval light philosophy in the 1930s, reading Grosseteste and Erigena. These philosophers shared the virtue of abstract authority, which was to become important in the notes composed in Rapallo during the late 1930s and published as Guide to Kulchur in 1938, and also in the composition of the Pisan Cantos. Pound could draw on forceful models of authority and action without requiring either freedom of movement or scholarly accuracy.
8Pound’s use of light philosophy in the Pisan Cantos is a part of his larger light “ideogram,” and signals a preoccupation with textual transmission: many of the philosophers that attract and retain Pound’s attention are notable for the precarious provenance of their texts. Light philosophy becomes a mediation of the inspired word transmitted through (or in spite of) a fragile and threatened text. Pound was absorbed with uncertain textual provenance throughout his career, as is evident in such early lyrics as “Papyrus,” in Lustra.5 Yet in the Pisan Cantos the issue becomes a properly reticulated one, impinging upon the status and composition of the text itself. It is somewhat fitting that a major philosophical and poetic device—light—should be employed in such circum-stances and given in such rhetoric. For light offers certainty where none remains, and writes in the spirit where the hand and the typewriter can only offer -hopeful missives. Light functions as a powerful vehicle of Pound’s exilic modernism. The metaphysical certainties and total reach of light philosophy, when measured against the tenuous textual provenance of its sources, functions as a model and vehicle for textual composition in the Pisan Cantos.
9The specific instances of light in the Pisan Cantos refine Pound’s use of light philosophers over his poetic career. Robert Grosseteste was an important source for Pound’s light philosophy, dating from his early study (1910) of the sources for Cavalcanti’s vocabulary in the “Donna mi prega” canzone. Pound published the essay “Cavalcanti” in Make It New (1934), that has been dated by T.S. Eliot from notes written during 1930-1931 (Literary Essays 149). It became clear to Pound that Cavalcanti was using “non-Aquinian” sources, and that an alternative metaphysical tradition might be hidden beneath the surface of the canzone: what was to become the “conspiracy of intelligence” in the Guide to Kulchur (263). The essay deals in detail with the affinities between Grosseteste and Cavalcanti: “His definition of ‘l’accidente’, i.e. the whole poem, is a -scholastic definition in form” (Make It New 360). This is despite Pound’s admission that no hard evidence exists to suggest that Cavalcanti had ever read Grosseteste: “It is too much to say that Guido had, perforce, read the Bishop of Lincoln, but certainly that is the sort of thing he had read” (360). Pound’s major critical source for Grosseteste was Etienne Gilson’s La Philosophie au Moyen Age, from which he quotes in the “Cavalcanti” essay (359). Pound carefully records Ludwig Baur’s edition of De Luce he consulted for Grosseteste’s theory of light. It is wholly consistent with Pound’s notion of authority and textual evidence that such care should be taken citing a medieval philosopher Cavalcanti may not have even read.
10Grosseteste is important to Pound for two reasons. Firstly, he embodies the care for terminology and definition that the best minds of Middle Ages produced. As Pound says in his essay, “Immediate Need of Confucius,” “Catholi-cism led Europe as long as Erigena, Grosseteste and their fellows struggled for definitions of words” (Selected Prose 90). Secondly, Grosseteste introduces the great Arab philosophical tradition to Pound: “Grosseteste derives in general, as Gilson points out, from Arabic treatises on perspective and the neo-Platonic tradition” (Michaels 39). The “Cavalcanti” essay indicates the importance of this lineage to Pound’s sense of European thought: “it would seem that Guido had derived certain notions from the Aristotelian commentators, the ‘filosofica famiglia’.” Pound goes on to cite a list of Arab philosophers including Avicenna and Averroes. He includes Grosseteste, although, as he points out, “this will need proving” (Make It New 356).
11Pound locates Grosseteste in a tradition of thought on light that also includes Confucius: “Grosseteste writin’ on light, hooks up with the ideogram of the sun and moon at the start of Confucius’ testament” (Ezra Pound Speaking 374). The affinity between Neo-Confucianism and medieval light philosophy is prevalent in The Pisan Cantos. A philosophy of action—so admired in Aristotle—is gradually replaced by one that manifests volition by a gathering of authority to the enlightened subject in the medium of light. The subject is not so much confined or immobile as having found a centre or balance.
12Pound’s light aesthetic is channeled through the notion of confinement in the Pisan Cantos: in “Canto LXXIV” the ego scriptor turns to figures of nature, only then to reflect upon the “magna NUX animae” or “great nut of the soul.” Carroll Terrell reads this image as the first development towards the “GREAT CRYSTAL” (XCI 611) and “the great acorn of light” (CXVI 795) in later cantos: these images from De Luce are consistent with Pound’s use of the neo-Platonic notion of nous (“Commentary” 454; Companion 548), and accords with Pound’s reformulation of authority in his exilic, estranged state. Perhaps the most important role played by Grosseteste in The Cantos occurs in “Canto LV,” where his words frame a passage from the I Ching:
Lux enim per se omnem in partem
Reason from heaven, said Tcheou-Tun-y
enlighteneth all things
seipsum seipsum diffundit, risplende
Is the beginning of all things, et effectu (LV 298)
13According to Walter Michaels, this passage signals a movement of “right reason” from an earthly to a transcendental principle through light philosophy, and alters the ethical role of Erigena in “Canto XXXVI” into the mystical figure of “Canto LXXIV” (45).
- 5 A second instance of the aphorism occurs in a discussion of Fiorentino (and his spelling there of E (...)
14The quotation from Erigena, “Authority comes from right reason, never the other way on,” occurs first in the “Donna mi prega” canto. (Incidentally, it is repeated in the Guide to Kulchur of 1938 at pages 74, 164, and 333, and in the Selected Prose at pages 61 and 92 in essays written in 1934 and 1937 respectively.) It is a translation from the Latin of Francesco Fiorentino’s Manuale di Storia della Filosofia (“Auctoritas ex vera ratione processi ratio vero nequaquam ex auctoritate” [I 217]‑5), and comes from Erigena’s De divisione Naturae, or Periphyseon. Whilst the provenance of Erigena’s text is not in dispute, its presence still raises some basic questions of authority and reference.
15The most obvious problem of reference is the question: why is Erigena mentioned here? The presence of this Irish theologian, poet and translator, immedately following Pound’s translation of the most prized canzone of “il miglior fabbro,” might need some explaining. Let us look at what the canto actually says:
Eriugena was not understood in his time
“which explains, perhaps, the delay in condemning him”
And they went looking for Manicheans
And found, so far as I can make out, no Manicheans
So they dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugena
“Authority comes from right reason
never the other way on”
Hence the delay in condemning him (XXXVI 179)
16Pound’s only source at this time was Fiorentino, who is presumably the voice within the first quotation marks. The line “Erigena was not understood in his time” refers to the double condemnation suffered by Erigena at the Council of Valence in January 855 and the Council of Langres in May 859. The supposed delay in condemning Erigena refers to an entirely different incident nearly 400 years later. In 1209 all copies of the Periphyseon were burned, when Erigena, along with other heretical characters, including Aristotle, were banned from the curriculum at the University of Paris. This third condemnation did not involve the exhumation of Erigena’s bones, but the digging out of his texts from the community of scholars. The passage seems clear on this point, but later occurrences of Erigena in the Pisan Cantos, particularly in “Canto LXXXIII,” cloud the issue. The Church authorities who carried out the Albigensian Crusade did so under the incorrect assumption they were rooting out the last Manichaeans in Europe, to be found in the culture of Provence, and in 1225 Pope Hono-rarius III condemned Erigena as an influence upon this heresy. Pound’s views on the destruction of the cult of amor (i.e. gai savoir, the Mediterranean sanity) are well known. The link between Erigena and the Albigenses—another link of textual transmission and dissemination, of authority, and of a fear exhuded by the authorities that illicit material would corrupt—is probably why Pound sought to mention the philosopher immediately after the “Donna mi prega” translation. Erigena is an example of the “Mediterranean sanity” which persisted in small pockets of Europe during the generally oppressive regime of the medieval church.
17The passage quoted compresses several events into one verse paragraph, without indicating the shift between centuries and condemnations. There is nothing out of place in this process (the so-called ply over ply), and the reader should be acclimatised to such compression in reading The Cantos. The mention of the Albigensian crusade in “Canto XXXVI” only confirms the link between the philosopher and the leader of the crusade in “Canto LXXXIII”: “so they dug up his bones in the time of De Montfort/(Simon)” (528). Yet debate has ensued over the meaning of “dug”: several scholars have read it literally as the exhumation of Erigena; others have read it as Pound’s -misreading of Fiorentino, confusing Erigena with the actually exhumed Almaric de Bene in 1207; and still others see Pound’s mistake in letting through a grammatical slip and confusing Erigena the man with his works.
- 6 This information was kindly provided to me by Richard Taylor in an email communication of 9 May 200 (...)
18Given the composition conditions of the Pisan Cantos, it is reasonable that Pound could have misread or mis-remembered Fiorentino. But couldn’t someone have checked? This confusion stood as a direct result of Pound’s estranged state of composition and its heightened effect on the text. His confusion is wholly within the remit of the exilic text: it simply becomes clearer when Pound writes within the Pisan DTC. Pound became angrier over time (following his extradition to Washington, and his arraignment and detention in St Elizabeths) over the frustrating delays in publishing the Pisan Cantos. The careful -checking of sources was no longer an option when Pound simply wanted the text to reach the printer in its then-current state.6That this error should remain provides a record of the texts Pound read, and the sharply delimited modes of reference available to him during the composition of the Pisan Cantos. If the error were edited out of the text, a significant element of its history and of its system of internal reference would be lost.
19The rising fortune of Erigena in the Pisan Cantos is due to something more than his formulation of light as a principle of reason and as a basic essence and substance. It is a function of Pound’s reading and familiarity with Erigena’s work, where progress is made from the mediated fragments found in Fiorentino and later, Etienne Gilson, to the volume of the Patrologia Latina Pound managed to grab from a library in Genoa in 1939-1940, and which had the most authoritative Latin text available at that time. In other words, the proposition that “authority comes from right reason” is contingent upon the authority of the text from which Pound quotes. Between “Canto XXXVI” and the Pisan Cantos, a solid basis has been built upon which to make such claims, and provides the textual authority that “right reason” simply cannot do without, regardless of its supposed autonomy.
20This also explains why Pound does not take the chance to use Erigena’s phrase, omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt, in the concluding lines of “Canto XXXVI”—this phrase occurs in Erigena’s commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, who in turn is quoting from Saint James on the “Father of Lights.” After Pound managed to secure a copy of the Patrologia, he wrote to T.S. Eliot on 18 January 1940, and could not resist the temptation to give him a taste of its contents:
A bit special but non-political. Johnny Scot. “Pietate insignia atque hilaritate.” Johnny had a nice mind. Omnia quae sunt lumina sunt. I haven’t yet found any-thing that fits what I had read about what he thought, but it may be in the 600 pages double ocl. Migne, vol. 122. (Letters 334)
21The first Latin quotation almost drops out of circulation in Pound’s writing—only the virtue of hilaritas is retained in his description of Erigena in the court of Charles the Bald (LXXXIII 528). But almost immediately, the second Latin phrase has taken on its recognised form, and Pound is not concerned to hide his scholarly tracks. Instead, the hilaritas and inluminatio found in the text of the Patrologia reflects, and is reflected by, those same reactions in Pound reading.
22“Canto LXXIV” presents Erigena’s thoughts on light within the larger sphere of writing about light. In fact, it is glossed by an ideogram that joins directly to Confucian doctrine. On page 429, the phrases “the silk worms early/in tensile” frame the ideogram on the page, itself a gloss to the text which follows: “in the light of light is the virtù/‘sunt lumina’ said Erigena Scotus/as of Shun on Mt Taishan” (LXXIV 429). The Ming2 ideogram was replaced by the Hsien4 ideogram in the Faber texts after 1975, and in the 1958 fourth printing of the New Directions Cantos I-LXXXIV. This change records a refinement of the notion of light: Ming2 is given the definition of “the tensile light descending,” or the “Light tensile immaculata” further down on the same page, and is seen to represent pictorially the sun and moon, the entire process of light (it also occurs in The Unwobbling Pivot, a text Pound was working on at Pisa); Hsien4 seems to signify a more abstract notion of clarity and radiance, a principle anterior to its manifestations. It is given the definition “display, be illustrious” by Terrell (367). Returning to the passage in “Canto LXXIV,” Erigena’s light philosophy is given in both Latin and English translation, along with the translation of the appropriate Chinese character. It presents the theory of gradations which imbues the cosmic metaphor in “the sun’s cord unspotted,” and also presents the misunderstood philosopher’s textual fate:
Light tensile immaculata
the sun’s cord unspotted
‘sunt lumina’ said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
‘OMNIA,
all things that are are lights’
and they dug him up out of sepulture
soi disantly looking for Manichaeans.
Les Albigeois, a problem of history (LXXIV 429)
23The passage does not present a causal relationship between the light philosophy and the “digging up” of Erigena (actually the burning of his texts), but presents them as brushstrokes contributing to an ideogram of wrongful accusation and blindness to metaphysical insight. Equally, the long silence concern-ing Erigena, through the Adams and China Cantos, is filled by the bridge of reference. This bridge, of Pound’s printed words, operates something like the ray of solar light, carrying the burden of authority and insight across space. It lands where it is most needed, and lights up a dark time in history, or a dark moment of reading.
24Notions of clarity and whiteness emerge throughout the text of the Pisan Cantos in the relation of light to “precise definition.” These notions are -intimately a part of the material constitution and transmission of the text, and trace out a dimension of its history. From the typescripts through to the published editions, whiteness and clarity coincide with tracts of space on the page. These areas compress an internal history of the text into meaningful, if sparse, text material. Areas of white space also trouble the precarious distinction between the -framing space of the text and its surrounding marginal space on the printed page: the latter incurs upon the former, in a hermeneutic as well as a physical gesture.
25It has been shown that the opening elegy to Mussolini in “Canto LXXIV” was added in a later stage of composition as a politically motivated afterthought (Bush “Excavating” 80). Prior to this moment of composition, however, the typescript begins with the lyric moment:
The suave eyes, quiet, not scornful
rain is also of the process
what you depart from is not the way
and olive trees blown white in the wind
and this whiteness
washed in the Kiang and Han
what whiteness will you add to this whiteness
- 7 Quotations from the typescripts and published texts ofthe Pisan Cantos are single-spaced and half-i (...)
what candor? (LXXVI 3393)7
26The typescript continues for another forty lines, much as in the published editions—until the line “laying hold of the earth”—but not before a space of approximately eight lines spreads out beneath the opening lines. The space is a function both of the whiteness to which Confucius’ pupils refer (the moral perfection of their master, and the unsurpassed principle he embodied), and the matter upon which these words and actions are grounded; that is, the cellulose of the page and the tellus or Chthonos that pervade this canto. This “interior” space is framed by more than the marginal space of the page, since a series of ideograms descends the right-hand side of the white emptiness of the typescript. These were lost in the transmission to publication.
27The typescript preceding this one is more liberally and erratically spread over the page, with greater margins, more varied indentations, and larger leading between lines:
The suave eyes , quiet , not wcornful [sic]
rain is also of the process
what you de<4>part from is not the way
and olive tree bl<l>oown white in the wind
and this whiteness
washed in the Kiang and Han
what whiteness will you add to this whiteness
what candor ?
the great periplum brings in the stars to our shore
28It seems clear that the phrasing of “whiteness” came to be regarded as the appropriate place for a larger text space to emerge in its own right. The liberal spacing of the field of print is condensed in the chronologically later typescript. The published editions also isolate this passage for the exploration of text space. The 1968 Faber edition has three different measures of line-indentation prior to the line:
what whiteness will you add to this whiteness,
what candour? (LXXIV 451)
29The phrase “what candour” appears on its own line, indented at least twice as far as any other, and encloses a pronounced space with the lines above and below. This space within the text field is semantically significant. The only pronounced gap in the print before that line is the final run-on line of the elegy to Mussolini:
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of
stars. (451)
30Empty space directs the reader’s attention to the whiteness of the page, the ground of the printed text—proving it to be more than empty space. It also functions in the Faber text as a medium through which to effect a compressed history of composition, pointing to the division between the Mussolini elegy and the original opening, by means of a space that is not a “legitimate” -spacing between stanzas or verse-paragraphs, but a run-on line, an “accident” of typographical design and layout.
31A later typescript (LXXVI 3394) introduces a space in the text between the elegy and the original opening, and maintains the space in the “whiteness” line and its following indented line. It marks Pound’s persistent attempt to -regulate the spaces between lines, and to regulate indents in the text: in the left-hand margin of the first page of this typescript he writes the comment, “not these variations of space between lines” and at the top of the page “more uniform margin +‑indents.” The New Directions text, with its larger text space, does not provide the run-on line found in the Faber text, and thus the two “whiteness” lines form the most substantial space in the text area to that point (as the elegy and the original opening are not separated by any empty line).
32An unnumbered loose page from the Beinecke archive already suggests the intimacy between hermeneutics and the material production of the text (the paper on which it is printed):
Above this candor , what whiteness
TEXNE, EPISTEME ?
Τεχνη επιστεμε all that we know of things is their sequence o
o
what precedes and what follows‑/ o o o o o o o o o o o o
o o o
PSUXE HYPER TON GASTRON‑/
ψοχι υπερ τον γαστρον.
(LXXVI 3381)
33The whiteness of Confucian principle binds the process of knowledge (episteme) with its production and practice (techne). Pound’s words are to be read both for their expressed meaning and for their physical constitution. To make this point clear (and to display the constraints of non-Roman alphabetic and ideographic reproduction), the page is typed, including the hollow suspension points, but the lower-case Greek alphabet and the Chinese script are produced in black ink. Even the history of this page is disclosed in its specific content. The inscribed elements were inserted after the Roman characters were typed, as if to prove “all that we know of things is their sequence.” Rather than a limiting condition of reading and knowledge production, it serves as a directive to read with care both the words and their media. The passage also demands the exercise of memory, for the phrase is repeated later in the Pisan Cantos: “To this whiteness, Tseng said/‘What shall we add to this whiteness?’” (LXXX 495).
34The extreme displacement Pound experienced at Pisa accentuated certain attitudes to writing, memory, and aesthetic work that had been developing for some time. The Pisan Cantos manipulates it page space and text space and their boundaries, to prompt a hermeneutic process at the level of the text’s -physical and ideational structure. The terms of history and the history of linguistics are encoded in the use of ideograms and the Greek alphabet. The use of light philosophy and its imagery operates not simply as a model of transcendence for the writer, but guides the reader’s assemblage of the text. Pound’s text aims to convey its message by the most effective and efficient means—alphabets, ideograms, diagrams, musical notation, the voice, its silence—and exhibits the non-transparency of transmission. The subject matter of the text draws on Pound’s prose writings, letters, and notes, and preserves them in a text-archive precariously transmitted to his family and editors.
35I hope to have shown in this paper that the exilic modernist text is not -simply an artifact deriving from an historical author and transmitted as a discrete object to a marketplace of readers and critics. It is a text in a process of assemblage, existing outside, as it were, the metaphysical boundaries and assumptions of the classical text frame. The text implicitly preserves an internal record or code of its archive, and constitutes a meditation on exile, suspension, and the possi-bility of literary composition itself. These features of the text help explain how diminished authority and apparent hermeneutic conflict are motivating forces of this exilic modernist text, rather than merely traces of authorial compromise and misfortune.
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