Disjecta Membra: Ezra Pound’s “Date Line,” 1934
What good is criticism? Ezra Pound pulled no punches with an answer. Criticism tries to serve as a theoretical gunsight: what to aim at. And the gun is more like a catapult. It will have to clear the trees here on earth before it leaves the atmosphere. “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” But the moon is much closer to home than the stars. Shoot for the stars — why not the sun? — and maybe you’ll end up on the moon. The artist aims and launches, showing how it’s done. The critic flies at dusk, just as the artist drifts off to sleep, nestled in a crater.
Pound agrees with Walter Benjamin’s pithy statement: “An [artist] who does not teach other [artists], teaches nobody.” Those others who put their eyes to the catapult-gunsight discover someone waiting in the crosshairs. They’ll have to aim beyond that...but at least as far. “Anywhere Out of the World!” The critic reports back on the real dimensions of the crater and the lay of the land around it. Pound compares the artwork’s illumination (the crater) and its reflection in the owl-eyes of the critic to two legs on the same body. So why hop along when you could be running and leaping?
“Excernment” is an obsolete word. It means sifting through the shit, which has never been in short supply. We’ve experienced a crisis of overproduction for some time now. And yet we starve. The task: “The ordering of knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part of it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues.” Nature (all that exists today) is a forest of obsolete issues. Every once in a while, confused whispers pass through the branches. Owls have a highly evolved sense of hearing, if they can remember how to use it.
— Austin Carder
Criticism so far as I have discovered has two functions:
Theoretically it tries to forerun composition, to serve as gunsight, though there is, I believe, no recorded instance of the foresight having EVER been of the slightest use save to actual composers. I mean the man who formulates any forward reach of coordinating principle is the man who produces the demonstration.
The others who use the principle learn usually from the example, and in most cases merely dim and dilute it.
I think it will usually be found that the work outruns the formulated or at any rate the published equation, or at most they proceed as two feet of one biped.
Excernment. The general ordering and weeding out of what has actually been performed. The elimination of repetitions. The work analogous to that which a good hanging committee or a curator would perform in a National Gallery or in a biological museum;
The ordering of knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part of it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues.
‘Admitted that it had nothing to do with life but said that it couldn’t be changed, therefore I did not take the course.’ (Letter from Cambridge student, Nov. 1933. The letter referred to economics and not to literature, but it is too good an example of the academic, of the alas, ‘university’ spirit to leave unused.) //
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Red Stone Dancer, 1913. Red Mansfield stone. Tate.
From: Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New Directions, 1968.
