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Chapter 1
Hard and Soft Modernism
Politics as “Theory”
Peter Nicholls
In an age of “Theory,” can we still think of literary modernism in terms of exclusionary dualisms? One invitation to do so is the fact that modernism was itself deeply rooted in dualistic and oppositional modes of thinking—the “figure of a defiant speech in excess of the norm is salient in modernism,” declares one critic (Al-Kassim 2010, 12). Yet even Ezra Pound (1968a), originator of many of the pithy antitheses that continue to be ritually invoked in accounts of modernist writing, broached his distinction between “hard” and “soft” forms of writing with uncharacteristic hesitation: “I apologize for using the semetaphorical [sic] terms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ in this essay, but after puzzling over the matter for some time I can see no other way of setting about it” (285). Then follows the elaboration of the terminology that would be so influential in subsequent readings of modernism (“the word ‘hard,’ ” notes Hugh Kenner (1988), “was coming into vogue” [131]):
By “hardness” [writes Pound] I mean a quality which is in poetry nearly always a virtue—I can think of no case where it is not. By softness I mean an opposite quality which is not always a fault. Anyone who dislikes these textural terms may lay the blame on Théophile Gautier, who certainly suggests them in Emaux et Camées; it is his hardness that I had first in mind. He exhorts us to cut in hard substance, the shell and the Parian. (Ezra Pound 1968a, 285)
As in the earlier manifesto statements for Imagism, Pound associates “hardness” with a constellation of “textural” features that favor “definiteness” of presentation over “abstraction,” and the external “shell” over the “muzziness” of unfettered introspection (Pound 1968a, 3–14). Although “softness” is “not always a fault”—Pound notes that it is “tolerable” in “the good Chaucerian” style—it tends to produce a “swash” of rhetoric that is at odds with the “clear hard” quality that he regards as a defining quality of the strong lyric tendency in French verse (Gautier versus “Hugo, De Musset & Co”) (286). This “hardness” will constitute the trademark style of the new modernism: the writing of “the next decade or so,” Pound insists, “will be harder and saner… It will be as much like granite as it can be…” (12).
It is worth noting the conjunction here of “clarity” and “hardness” since, paradoxically perhaps, it affirms “a hardness which is not of necessity ‘rugged’; as in ‘Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives'” (286). The line Pound quotes from Walter Savage Landor is, indeed, far from “rugged” or granite-like, exemplifying in its sinuous weaving of /i/ and /l/ sounds a musicality grounded in clearly marked syllabic differentiation rather than in a “muzzy” melisma. This emphasis on differentiation underpins his related arguments for aesthetic autonomy: the “clean,” “hard,” inorganic values of Imagism and Vorticism are the only ones which seem adequately to represent an intelligence which avoids surplus and works by reduction, denying itself the immediate pleasures of the “caressable” and the mimetic (“The caressable,” says Pound, “is always a substitute” [1960, 97]). “Hardness,” by this account, is a stylistic and ethical feature of verse that represents a challenge to poetic convention: “Gautier is intent on being ‘hard’: is intent on conveying a certain verity of feeling, and he ends by being truly poetic. Heredia wants to be poetic and hard; the hardness appears to him as a virtue in the poetic” (285). Pound's own distinction could be clearer here, but he seems to suggest that the particular “hardness” of Heredia's work is governed by preexisting poetic models—Gautier, chiefly—rather than by a “verity of feeling” that properly precedes the discovery of the “truly poetic.” As a result, Heredia's poems tend somewhat toward the “frigid,” their “hardness” ultimately a product of stylistic mannerism, while Gautier's verse, in contrast, cleaves to the supple contour of an original emotion.
At this point in his career, Pound's influential advocacy of “hardness” over “softness” is expressed in predominantly stylistic terms, and so it would be grasped by subsequent generations of poets who would see the emphasis on precision and economy as a sine qua non of any theory of modernist writing.1It was hardly surprising, though, that in composing his essay on French poetry Pound had found the use of these terms ineluctable (“I can see no other way of setting about it”) because their transparently gendered inflections already implied political preferences yet to be clearly announced. Indeed, for Pound, the favored “hardness” would soon come to be equated with the political as such, characterizing the emotional tonality and rigor appropriate to the “verities” to be expressed. In the political realm, this “hardness” would connote a directness and a lack of ambiguity easily distinguishable from allegedly decadent forms of “softness”; in Pound's later writing, as in that of Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and (perhaps less obviously) Eliot, it would often be colored by a kind of bravado through which certain rhetorical postures—Lewis as “the Enemy,” for example—were adopted in support of claims for artistic authority.2 When it came to poetic style, however, the clear separation of qualities was somewhat harder to sustain and this perhaps explains Pound's caveat that “softness…is not always a fault.” In the case of The Cantos, passages of sustained lyricism were intended to achieve a sculptural “hardness” through visual clarity and syllabic patterning (“Rhythm is a form cut into TIME, as a design is determined SPACE,” Pound emphasized (1968b, 198) but, as Lewis remarked of a visionary episode in Canto XVII, the verse was to some extent still dependent on “swinburnian stage-properties”, a sure sign of a lingering “softness” (“it is composed upon a series of histrionic pauses, intended to be thrilling and probably beautiful,” Lewis cuttingly concluded [1993, 71]).
Lewis's own art would always be more uncompromisingly “hard” than Pound's, in part because his commitment to what he called a “philosophy of the Eye” (1987, 97)—“This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see” (1990, 300)—was closely bound up with his conception of satire, a mode that requires a “petrification” of the human into the thing-like, an ensemble of grotesque surfaces rather than “classical proportion” (“art,” he writes, “consists…in a mechanising of the natural” [1987, 129; his emphasis]). Lewis's repudiation of the natural in favor of the “deadness” of the artwork accordingly values the “hippopotamus' armored hide” above the “naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life.” The satirical attitude, as he defines it, entails an absolute embrace of “hardness,” asserting the artistic necessity of distance and objectivity. Yet it is exactly the seductive appeal of the “soft inside” of life that he detects everywhere in the arts of democratic modernity where “otherness, like opposition, is reactionary. We are all One Fellow” (1984, 73). Lewis sees the works of his modernist colleagues as variously capitulating to this failure of “opposition,” as trading the “otherness” that should properly define the aesthetic for the “soft” consolations of primitivism, childish innocence, and the self-regarding rituals of democratic identification.
There are, we might note, some significant limits to Lewis's critique of his fellow modernists, and what he condemns as invertebrate empathy is at times more critical and “external” than he acknowledges: even Gertrude Stein (1946 [1971]), arch-exemplar, for Lewis, of “the child-cult,” believed that “Nobody can enter into anybody else's mind; so why try? One can only enter into it in a superficial way” (993). Lewis's critique of Pound's work, however, strikes a more direct hit, mainly because he traces the lingering “softness” there to a persistently romantic attitude toward history:
By himself he would seem to have neither any convictions nor eyes in his head. There is nothing that he intuits well, certainly never originally. Yet when he can get into the skin of somebody else, of power and renown, a Propertius or an Arnaut Daniel, he becomes a lion or a lynx on the spot. This sort of parasitism is with him phenomenal. (1993, 68; his emphases)
Readers weighing this passage might assent to Lewis's description of Pound's habitual use of personae and textual ventriloquism but would probably also object that these are the very devices that underlay the poet's innovative handling of translation and textual collage. Generally less noticed is Lewis's criticism of his friend's lack of intuition and originality and this goes deep, suggesting a fundamental division that Lewis sees as crucially damaging to Pound's whole project.3 The comment in fact tacitly transposes the “hard”/“soft” distinction to one between what we might call the theoretical and the aesthetic. In this respect, Lewis's thinking has something in common with that of Mikhail Bakhtin whose unfinished text now translated as Toward a Philosophy of the Act was composed several years before Time and Western Man (1927).4 Bakhtin (1993) there describes what he calls “the theoretical world” as one which is “obtained through an essential and fundamental abstraction from the fact of my unique being” and in its place he proposes a “participative” thinking that is “unindifferent” and “engaged”: “Every thought of mine, along with its content, is an act or deed that I perform—my own individually answerable act or deed [postupok]” (9,3). The truth of thought lies in the uniqueness and situatedness of the moment of its performance; hence “It is an unfortunate misunderstanding (a legacy of rationalism) to think that truth [Pravda] can only be the truth [istina] that is composed of universal moments; that the truth of a situation is precisely that which is repeatable or constant in it” (37).5 The aesthetic world might seem to offer an attractive alternative to theory's pull toward abstraction, but it, too, proves ultimately inadequate:
…aesthetic being is closer to the actual unity of Being-as-life than the theoretical world is. That is why the temptation of aestheticism is so persuasive. One can live in aesthetic being, and there are those who do so, but they are other human beings and not I myself… But I shall not find myself in that life; I shall find only a double of myself, only someone pretending to be me. All I can do in it is play a role, i.e., assume, like a mask, the flesh of another—of someone deceased. (18; his emphases)
Like Lewis, Bahktin regards aestheticism as evading the whole question of the thinker's “answerability” which “remains in actual life, for the playing of a role as a whole is an answerable deed performed by the one playing, and not the one represented, i.e., the hero” (18; his emphases). This is the import of Lewis's emphatic “By himself” which suggests that the abstraction of “theory” is registered in Pound's work by the poet's effective absence from his own thought (for it is never, according to Lewis, truly his own, originating instead in the dead “flesh” of someone else).6 Through his habitual ventriloquism, Pound “becomes a lion or a lynx on the spot,” and this “parasitically” acquired power substitutes for the authority that should properly accrue from “answerable” thinking.
In this confrontation of Lewis's thought with Pound's we see how unstable “hard” and “soft” can be as descriptive and evaluative terms. For Lewis, a “hard,” “non-human outlook” is necessary “to correct our soft conceit” while for Pound the human is, ideally, at one with nature and its rhythms—a “soft” metaphysics, in Lewis's view, and one that means that the “hard” side of the equation comes to express itself in Pound's work only through abstractions imported from sources external to it (1987, 99). In this sense, we might say that The Cantos would turn out to be (as Lewis's comment partly predicts) determined by a constellation of “theories” on whose iterable truths—economic, political, philosophical—the poem would increasingly come to depend. Against the pressure of rhetorical and didactic insistence that accompanied this dependence, the “soft” dimensions of the poem—its imagistic rich...
