The Textual Condition by Jerome J. McGann

Author:Jerome J. McGann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

In this general context, then, let me ask once more the question: “What is the structure of the act of reading?” Like Adler, we commonly think this question will be addressed by analyzing the linear processes of the linguistic text. That is to say, we seek to investigate that form of reading by which one moves from grapheme to word to phrase to sentence and, thence, on through the larger rhetorical and generic forms which make up the linguistic text. Once again Pound’s ABC of Reading is a most useful point of departure because Pound’s theory of writing and reading is caught in a conflict of commitments. The conflict is clear in the following famous passage from chapter 4:

The charging of language is done in three principal ways: . . . called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You use a word to throw a visual image on to the reader’s imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this.

Thirdly, you take the greater risk of using the word in some special relation to “usage,” that is, to the kind of context in which the reader expects, or is accustomed, to find it.4

In this formulation Pound remains tied to a linguistic model of language. His linguistic orientation is most apparent in his definition of phanopoeia, which evidently does not correspond to his own practice as a writer. For in Pound’s work, phanopoeia may be observed not only in “images” evoked by words and strings of words; it operates as well as rhetorical and even abstract constructions of the page as a visual field. We have already seen Pound employ constructivist procedures even in ABC of Reading, but the method is most elaborately deployed in the Cantos, which use decorative materials in ways that distinctly (and deliberately) recall the tradition of ornamental books passed on to Pound by William Morris and the late nineteenth century in general (for an example see figure 8 in chapter 6). Because Pound is “quoting” those traditions, however, the illustrative materials function at an abstract and cognitive level at least as much as they do at an imagistic level. Though grounded in the tradition of symbolic book illustration, this kind of page is highly abstract and self-referential, and distinctly anticipates the presentational forms developed by action painting and that movement’s more representational (postmodern) inheritors.5

The second example, from Canto LXXXVI, underscores the point. Much has been made of Pound’s ideogrammic theories, and the view persists—through some of Pound’s own misleading (and contradicted) misconceptions—that the ideogram is for Pound a kind of image. On the contrary, the ideogram is for Pound the idea of the image. In the Cantos, therefore, Chinese ideograms function not linguistically or logically but phenomenologically, like the abstract and conceptual forms in action paintings. On page 567 from Canto LXXXVI, for example, the ideograms are carefully arranged on the field of the page as a kind of “unwobbling pivot” for the more nervous play of the European text6 (see illus. 3).

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