Intertexts, Vol. 7, No. 1,2003 Persistent Oscillations: Poetics of the Feminine in Pound Geun Young Jang K O R E A U N I V E R S I T Y There be thy mirrour in men. (85/554)' There have been two different critical traditions on Pound’s conception of the feminine. Several critics underscore Pound’s positive attitude towards woman despite his denigration of the feminine; for example, Christine Brooke-Rose and James J. Wilhelm argue that Pound is not anti-femimst normasculinist.AccordingtoBrooke-RoseandWilhelm,Poundstood againstbothbinaryoppositionsandtheChristiantrinitythathadexcluded thefemininefromWesterndiscourse.OtherspointoutthatPound’sviewof woman is ambiguous and, sometimes, contradictory. Examinmg Poimd s “The SeriousArtist” (1913) and Canto 85 in The Cantos, Salah el Moncef contendsthatthepoetthrough“amalgamation”becomesaselflessreflector of“manymen’s”voices(134).2RobertCasillogivesaninsightfuldiscussion ofPound’sconfusedandambivalentconceptionofthefeminine,linking Pound’sdoublednotionoftheOrientalism^oftheNearEast,hisanti-Semi¬ tism,andthefeminineintermsofaparadoxicalcombinationofinfertilenothing and carnal-excess.'* Maintaining that the Orient was implicitly iden¬ tified with the feminine in Western scholarship and literature, Casillo argues that“theNearEaststandsfortheparadoxicallicenseandbarrenness,the darkness and confusion, of demonic matriarchy” (273,277). Introducing the notion of the fluidities® to current critical traditions, thisessaywillattempttorereadPound’sgendermattersthroughthelensof psychoanalysis.As Pound disliked Freudian psychoanalysis, it is true that therehavebeensometendenciesamongPoundscholarstoopposepsycho¬ analyticreadings.*DiscussingPound’spersistentoscillationsbetweenfemi¬ nineandmasculine,however,Iarguethathispoetryandpoeticsaredeeply intertwined with the feminine, and his “entry into the symbolic” is unstable, becausehecouldnotcompletelysucceedinrepressingthefeminineinhim¬ self. In this respect, my use of the term “the entry into the symbolic” is deeply influenced by Lacan’s dissident daughter Irigaray to the extent that she criticizes Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalysis for their masculinism in Speculum. Generally, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, “the entry into the sym¬ bolic” means the child’s entry into language and subjectivity. Rather than the child’s entry into the symbolic, in my use of this term, Iwill emphasize the exclusion of woman and her objectification by way of her becoming a I N T E R T E X T S 9 2 for masculine subjectivity. In this essay, Iwill make acase for employm i r r o r ing French feminist approaches in seeing Pound’s gender matters. Iwill find ablurring of normative heterosexuality in Pound’s poetic writings by analyz¬ ing his appropriation and deployment of the fluidities—his experiments with genderinhisuseofpersonae—inhisearlypoems. Personae as Pound’s Appropriation of the Feminine As Eli Goldblatt points out, “men can be ‘penned in’ by the ‘male defined masks and costumes’ with which women have long contended” (38). Quot¬ ing Rachel Blau Duplessis’s remark on “strong male bonding relations,” in Pound, Goldblatt explains in detail George and Mary Oppen’s meeting with him: “When they met Pound in Rapallo in 1930, the Oppens were ‘both¬ ered’ by the way Pound seemed interested only in talking to George, and so together they resisted Pound as a‘father’” (52-53). Duplessis says fiirtlier: “There were two of us [the Oppens], and in Pound there is no feminine” (53). Avoiding apsychoanalytic reading of Pound’s gender dynamics, Gold¬ blatt suggests “a cultural investigation” (35). Although Goldblatt’s scheme is limited, some of his observations are useful. First, Goldblatt notes that “[pjerhaps there was afeminine in Ezra Pound that even his close associates could not see”; moreover, for Goldblatt, the Eleusinian Mysteries function as the yin to the Conflician yan^, and these mysteries^ “represent afemale element in the Cantos znA as such form the center of Pound’s Muse worship as well as his misogyny” (53).* Whereas Goldblatt suggests gender as “a cultural conception that Pound explored with ferocious care,” Paul Smith offers abroader range of psychoanalytic readings of Pound in gender issues, not restricted to “gender as atheme to be found in aparticular canon” (35).^ Seeing Pound’s poetics as totalitarian. Smith argues that “the radical heterogeneity that the crossing of the symbolic with the semiotic entails”—Joyce’s practice of what Kristeva terms si^nifiance (96)—is opposed to signification, “the simple (Poundian) fixity of position that the bonding of signifier and signified entails.”*® Pre¬ senting Joyce as opposed to the Poundian practice, signification, Smith arguesthatJoyce“ismoreconcernedwiththeisruptingofthatcoincidence within the actual process, the theatre perhaps, of language” and is “for process against fixity, for language against sight” (96-97). Certainly, Smith is quite correct that later Pound was the ardent pursuer of the bonding of signifier and signified. Yet...