Showing papers in "South Central Review in 1986"

The Conqueror-Hero, the Besieged City, and the Development of an Elizabethan Protagonist

Abstract: Perhaps the overriding cultural question of the Renaissance was whether the human will could be authenticated. That is, could we humans be regarded as proposers and executioners of action without arrogating to ourselves the prerogatives of the deity? Medieval culture generally assumed that we could not; the world was God's, our place and purpose in it were assigned, and we either accepted or rejected the attendant moral imperatives. Modern Western culture generally has assumed that we can, but it has been so uncritical of its assumption that there may soon be no world for us to inhabit, either psychologically, socially or physically. Much of the fascination of Renaissance culture is the way it wrestled with the existential challenge I have defined in the preceding paragraph. And just as Classical Athenians discovered that drama was the most powerful vehicle through which to come to grips with the challenge, so too did Renaissance Englishmen. Tragedy was reborn when Elizabethan dramatists felt their way to the working assumption that ambition selfconsciously and powerfully pursued is not per se sinful but that it is always problematic. Perhaps an underlying logic dictated that the revenger, the tyrant, and the military conqueror emerged as the favored protagonists of Elizabethan tragedy. Each is engaged in acts traditionally allowed to divinity but at least partially forbidden by man's own morality to himself. Therefore the playwrights could develop their actions so as to raise questions central to tragedy: are their protagonists imitating the divine, and if so, are they thereby transcending and/or violating the human?

The Passing of the Seasons and the Apocalyptic in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"

Abstract: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' is a poem which would, at first glance seem to have little in common with the three overtly religious poems, especially Purity, to which it is linked in terms of style and language. Yet the seemingly secular Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is surprisingly at one with the other works ascribed to the anonymous fourteenth-century Gawain-Poet. The thematic signature that stamps Sir Gawain, as well as the other poems, proves to be the poet's preoccupation with judging the communities of men with which he deals in order to effect the separation of the saved from the damned.2 Sir Gawain is, after all, a poem about moral assessments and values, and its web of themes and imagery can be seen to be centered directly upon the problem of judgment,3 where the thematic focus is consistently on the ends of things and how those ends relate to their beginnings. This should come as no surprise, since the poem's famous excursus detailing the passing of the year-a passage used to join the initiation of the adventure with the onset of its completion-is immediately preceded by a narrative intrusion in which the poet muses on the unexpected ends of endeavors begun by men in a mutable world: "A 3ere 3ernes ful 3erne, and 3eldes neuer lyke, / be forme to be be fynisment foldez ful selden" (498-499). That ends are frequently belied by beginnings is of the utmost importance to our understanding of the portrait of this seemingly vibrant court whose members are in their "first age" (54), painted by an artist whose frequent theme is that "the first shall be last."4

An Interview with Thea Astley

Abstract: (Rodney Hall and Thea Astley attended the 1984 South Central Modern Language Association's Special Session on Major Australian Novelists under the auspices of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Before coming to Biloxi, Ms. Astley and Rodney Hall read selections from their work at the Guggenheim Museum's Australian Visions exhibit and at the Harborfront Festival Writers' Week in Canada, which was attended by writers from Brazil, England, Jamaica, Finland, and Germany. Yevtushenko read on the same program with Rodney Hall, and Moycyr Scliar and Robert Stone read on the program with Thea Astley. The following is an edited excerpt from an interview with Thea Astley conducted at the SCMLA convention in Biloxi.)

Moviemaking in Percy's "Lancelot"

Abstract: In 1976,1 as he recalls the year before for Father John, Lancelot Lamar pictures a world dominated by moviemaking. His Louisiana estate, Belle Isle, had been invaded by his "wife's friend's film company" (25), to make a movie "about some people who seek shelter in the great house during a hurricane, a young Cajun trapper, a black sharecropper, a white sharecropper, a Christlike hippy, a Klan type, a beautiful halfcaste but also half-wit swamp girl, a degenerate river rat, the son and daughter of the house..." (25-26). Absent from the list is the drunken owner of the great house, Lipscomb: that much of the movie parallels life.

Greene's "The Honorary Consul" and Lowry's "Under the Volcano": A Study in Influence

Abstract: The origin of my next novel, The Honorary Consul, written between 1970 and 1973, lies in the cave of the unconscious. I had a dream about an American ambassador.., .but in my dream there was no kidnapping, no guerrillas, no mistaken identity, nothing to identify it with The Honorary Consul except the fact that the dream lodged inexplicably in my head for months and during those months the figures of Charlie Fortnum and Dr. Plarr stole up around the unimportant Ambassador of my dreams and quietly liquidated him. (Ways of Excape, 301)

Dehumanized or Inhuman: Doubles in Edward Bond

Abstract: question of how the playwright's stated purpose of developing a "rational" theater is realized in a body of work that seems more nearly mythic than realistic. Even a superficial review of article titles confirms the centrality of this interest in reconciling the political and the poetic aspects of Bond's work.1 Again and again, the critics return to a set of ideas and themes that are, as Jenny S. Spencer notes, quite direct and uncomplicated.2 Their concern is not unwarranted. Bond's theater is political, and his focus of investigation is nothing less than the survival of all the human, humane qualities of the political animal, the dweller in a contemporary polis. Yet the discussion of these relatively simple (in abstract formulation) ideas is rarely simple and seldom uncomplicated. Spencer herself characterizes Bond's work as an attempt "to present representations of reality (mediated by theatrical convention in the same way ideology mediates perception) which are both recognizable as our own world, and yet untenable (in need of change)."3 The convolutions of syntax in Spencer's discussion represent difficult convolutions of thought, from the doubly metaphorical "present representations"-of reality, of convention, of ideology as filtered by perception-to the paradox of an impossibility which is immediately recognizable, her parenthetical style reflecting the difficulty of writing about rational drama in an irrational world. To use a currently fashionable term, Bond's poetic dramas "deconstruct" dominant myths of perceptions, of conventions, and of ideologies in the controlled application of a few carefully chosen images. Ruby Cohn is quite correct in her characterization of Bond's theater as "fabulous;"4 indeed, Bond's work develops a reasoning man's fable of our times. Where the traditional fables of Aesop use animals to demonstrate human foibles, Bond's modem fables utilize a similar, if more subtle, version of this technique by surrounding characters with images of dehumanization or metaphors connecting them to animals.

The Rules of the Game: A Para-Theory of Literary Theories

Abstract: It has been more than a decade since Jacques Ehrmann wrote that "Play, reality, [and] culture are synonymous and interchangeable ... .[Thus] any theory of communication (or of information) implies a theory of play.., .and a game theory."1 Ehrmann's insight into the vital relation of play to culture represents a critical and philosophical tradition that has for the most part been ignored by modern literary theorists. Criticism's failure to develop a theory of literary games is puzzling for two reasons. First, as Jonathan Culler has recently remarked, current critical theory is primarily engaged in the development of an as yet nascent poetics, that is, a systematic "theory of the relations... between literature and the other modes of discourse which make up the text of intersubjective experience."2 A poetics so conceived would demonstrate literature's importance as a cultural institution by revealing the role played by fiction-making in our daily construction of and participation in reality. This poetics would elevate fiction to a position equal to that of "more serious" pursuits such as work and politics. And this, I shall argue, would also be the most important result of a theory of literary games. Second, the critical theorist, like the novelist and poet, inevitably plays games of several kinds with language, and any poetics aiming at inclusivity must acknowlege this dimension of the critical as well as the literary act. The purpose of the following essay is to suggest the role that a theory of game will play in the development of a complete literary poetics. The expression "game theory," as it is most frequently used, denotes a sophisticated mathematical approach to "social phenomena with which certain games are strictly identical."3 Its usefulness was first foreseen by Leibniz in 1710, and James Waldegrave developed "the notion of minimax strategy" two years later.4 Numerous works have since extended the concept into other fields such as physics and military science; the most important extension in our time is found in John von

George Herbert Pulling for Prime

Abstract: Like Wisdom before the Father (Proverbs 8:27-31) and David before the Ark (2 Samuel 6:21-22), George Herbert plays in God's presence. In the temple of his heart he finds a playmate, the in-dwelling spirit, and they play games together in The Temple of his poems. By projecting from himself an other whom he meets in poetic play, he gains a sense of inner unity-an integral self separate from his intimidating heritage, but bound to an inner friend. Their mode of play matches Herbert's choleric nature; they join in games, contests, combats, and puzzles-agons that can turn agony into joy. Although a gamester himself, Herbert shared the more sober-minded reformers' distrust of play. In "The Church Porch" of The Temple he warns against wasting time on "dressing, mistressing, and complement," calls gambling "a civil gunpowder," and counsels men to "Fool not."' But he also shared the opinion of Erasmus, a less dour reformer who knew the value of folly and play. "All things are bigge with jest" (239), he rejoices, and describes life as a game (at archery or cards) where risks are inevitable, but prudent play will win.2 Herbert's attitude toward play is complex; play (like life) is at times a risky folly that requires prudence. His attitude toward work is no less complex. Since "Life is a businesse, not good cheer" ("Employment II"), he emulates the bees who "bring hony" and "Sting [his] delay" ("Employment I," "Praise I"). Yet the most productive work he describes in The Temple is indistinguishable from play: the floral and musical offerings that he would make his Edenic work in "Employment I" and the worship of the bee-like stars in "The Starre." He asks the star to "flie home like a laden bee," carrying his heart to "that hive of beams/And garland-streams" which crowns God's face. There he hopes to "Glitter, and curle, and winde" among the other beams. Flower, bee, star, and the speaker merge in the "winding [that] is their fashion/Of adoration"-a worship in which the "Glitter" resembles play and the "gaining," work. For Herbert, true work, like worship, is play. To see how he reconciles the prudence and structure of work with the risk and feedom of play will require an inquiry into the games he plays with the friend who is at once within and far beyond him. Herbert describes The Temple as "a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that

Rules/Conventions: Three Paradoxes in the Game/Text Analogy

Abstract: formulations that scholars can give to conventions in the expectation that they will thereby become rules. Indeed, to have that kind of knowledge of the conventions probably frustrates the absorption into the text that makes reading both significant and enjoyable. The more the reader knows, in the cold, formulaic sense of having the conventions at his command, the less likely he is to be "run away with." There is thus a division between knowledge and experience in reading literature that runs counter to the fusion of the two in gameplaying. In games, commentary (always a kind of decoding) is the direct application of known rules to describe and predict; in literature, commentary (always a kind of intepretation) is the movement away from the experience to a model of significance. In literature the intepretive model succeeds the act of reading; in games, the model is an extrapolation of a known code that precedes the act of playing. If literary texts are games, then they are certainly paradoxical ones, to be accounted for in terms of the inverse of those normally apposite to games. A consideration of the way in which feelings enter into the activities of game-playing and reading further supports the argument that the procedures of commentary in the two activities (decoding, on the one This content downloaded from 157.55.39.129 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 06:18:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 24 South Central Review hand; interpretation, on the other) are in reverse order. In games, the feelings that players have during the course of play are beside the point; they are, simply, irrelevant to the game and to the definition of game, though on the subjective level they may not be irrelevant to the players themselves. One may feel that a certain game, or a certain state of play, is beautiful or ugly but that does not matter insofar as it is a game. There are chess games, such as the "Immortal," that are remembered for their elegance and beauty and are often recapitulated for these reasons. Nabokov, looking back upon his novel, The Defense, remarks that "replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky-who is doomed to accept it over and over again through an infinity of textbooks, with a question mark for monument."17 But this esthetic tradition has nothing to do with games as games: the "Immortal" is neither more nor less a game of chess because it is elegant, beautiful, and haunting. One's feelings that the "Immortal" possesses these qualities have no more to do with its essential gamefulness than if one were to sneeze while recapitulating it. Yet literature clearly entails feelings, and certain kinds of literature entail an explicit range of feeling. Todorov defines an entire genre, the "Fantastic," upon the quality of feeling that reading engenders (a hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations),18 and more than a hundred generations of Aristotle's followers have made the feelings of pity and fear a part of the definition of Tragedy. The second paradox is as starkly simple, and as central to the concerns of literary analysis, as is the first. No doubt a game's pattern, a particular situation (as in the case of a chess-problem), or even the code of rules itself may be transposed into the steps of a narrative. Carroll's Through The Looking-Glass demonstrates that this is not only possible but narratively effective. Yet once this has happened, the game ceases to be a game and becomes something else; the game rules that have shaped the narrative structure metamorphose into aspects of the text's conventionality. In this way, something (a game) that is essentially inflexible and abstract becomes something else that is flexible and concrete. This metamorphosis leads directly to the second paradox. Whatever the abstract game-pattern that may have informed a narrative, it cannot be seen intuitively in the text that (perhaps) it has made possible. Just as given conclusions may have a plurality of premises or any actual event a plurality of possible causes, so a particular text may be seen to have a number of structural patterns. Furthermore, texts seem to swallow their assumptions; the more abstract these are, the more deeply swallowed they become. Perhaps a critic could, given a highly precise and analytic method, recover an underlying game-pattern from a literary text. Still, the operation would be neither evidentially simple (as it would be to find the presupposed rules in any actual game) nor intuitively easy. To This content downloaded from 157.55.39.129 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 06:18:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Individuation in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Abstract: For many playgoers, Demetrius's groggy judgment upon the Athenian lovers' nightmare in the dark wood-"These things seem small and undistinguishable, /Like far-off mountains turned into clouds"has captured the metamorphic quality of the most popular of Shakespeare's early comedies.1 In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the effect of repeated transformations, whether of a "western flower" into a magical pansy, or of a weaver into an ass, is a certain haziness not only in the characters' minds but in those of viewers as well. Such metamorphoses and resulting uncertainty of mind work against one meaning of individuation-the unique, clearly delineated "thisness" or "thatness" of a given object or idea. By all accounts, Romantic and Victorian audiences valued this blurring of identities, for, in their minds, it made possible that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play. And yet many details of A Midsummer Night's Dream confirm the importance of individuation for Shakespeare's design. When Oberon, for example, tells Puck that he shall know the youth disdaining Helena "by the Athenian garments he hath on" (II. i. 264), a lapse in individuation plunges the four lovers into their erotic Walpurgisnacht. Lysander's Grecian garb qualifies him, in Robin Goodfellow's eyes, for the juice of the magical flower meant for Demetrius; evidently fairies, at least Elizabethan fairies, do not fully grasp the need for differentiating social dress and appearance.2 The comic blunder, however, implies that such differences are important in this early comedy. After all, Lysander's original love for Hermia is greater than that of Demetrius, even as his fortunes have the vantage over those of the latter youth (I. i. 99-102). Significantly, a breakdown of individuation lies at the heart of the play's central conflict. Until Oberon and Titania's brawl is settled, the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta-or of any of the Athenian loverswould be ill-advised, simply because the Nature disturbed by the fairies' quarrel remains hostile to happiness. Thus possession of the Indian boy who sparks Oberon and Titania's feud becomes the key to overall comic

The Politics of Autobiography in the "Biographia Literaria"

Abstract: Romantic poetry is nothing if not the poetry of crisis, and, as its seminal theorist, Coleridge dutifully produces the most crisis-ridden poetry and prose of the period. In the Biographia Literaria, arguably the most traumatized of Coleridge's works, cohesive patterns of meaning never seem to emerge from the chaotic and fragmentary offerings. Instead, the frantic twists and turns away from a unifying development suspend coherence above an intellectual hodgepodge of inquiry, formulation, reformulation, and rebuttal. Jerome Christensen has recently termed this confusion Coleridge's "marginal method," arguing cogently that the Biographia is a compendium of fragmented commentaries on precedent texts-Hartley, Wordsworth, God, the will, the Bible, etc.1 But Christensen, while reaffirming an opinion common to most readers of the Biographia (that the book is disorganized and hard to read), in no way represents mainstream Coleridge scholarship. To the contrary, his work radically threatens much of what is sacred. This is the case in part because Coleridge, more than any other Romantic poet, has fostered a tradition of critical apologetics. From daughter Sara's long-winded introductions and appendices to the latest and most impressive works on the Biographia, "Coleridgeans" have had to reconcile a very appealing genius with what are often very unappealing modes of presentation. As a result, the critical voices responsible for the poet's canonization have been necessarily strident. While the more vociferous apologists have all disappeared, their legacy continues in a less obtrusive but more effective form, in a very learned and respectable discourse which ingeniously deifies Coleridge while defusing any possibility for the recognition of the crisis so much a part of his Romanticism. Two recent books on the Biographia both offer insightful new ways to approach a difficult work; and both are similar in method and assumption.2 Kathleen Wheeler roots Coleridge in a Socratic tradition in order to find a pervasive irony and use of metaphor intended to educate the

Bloomsbury: And After?

Abstract: Once upon a time a group of gifted, intelligent, and versatile people assembled irregularly but gracefully and wittily in the capital of the greatest empire in the world. They had the unstated object of amusing, sparring with, and improving each other and, more or less incidentally, of transforming a world pleasant enough for them into a just and rational society. The twin specters of death and taxes did not loom very threateningly: the group had not solved the problem of death, to be sure, but most of them were young and healthy enough not to have to face it directly; taxes were low and inherited income secure. While none of them was rich, all were comfortable, and they could enjoy the comforting proximity of millionaires-not arrivistes, but people who understood both the letter and the spirit of noblesse oblige, not only welloff, but well-bred. This circle was even better than the one in Camelot: there were no

Language Typology 1985: Papers from the Linguistic Typology Symposium, Moscow, 9-13 December 1985

Abstract: 1. Preface 2. Primes (by Lehmann, Winfred P.) 3. Basic Typological units (by Yartseva, Viktoria N.) 4. Areal Phonetic typology in time: North and East Asia (by Austerlitz, Robert) 5. Lexico-semantic reconstruction and the linguistic paleontology of culture (by Gamkrelidze, Thomas V.) 6. Universals specials and typology (by Solntsev, V.M.) 7. Commensurability of terms (by Harris, Alice C.) 8. Metalanguage (by Timberlake, Alan) 9. On the notion of language type (by Klimov, Georgij A.) 10. On typological shift (by Gukhman, M.M.) 11. Discourse function and word order shift: A typological study of the VS/SV alternation (by Hopper, Paul J.) 12. On from and content in typology (by Nichols, Johanna) 13. The meaning-form correspondence in grammatical description (by Kibrik, Andrej A.) 14. A survey of major Alaskan language types (by Krauss, Michael E.) 15. References 16. Index

The Restitution of Paternity in Moliere's "Le Malade Imaginaire"

Abstract: It is remarkable indeed that in his final play, Le Malade imaginaire, Moliere should have introduced three elements hitherto unexploited by him in his theater. To an already well-established cast of characters, the playwright chose to add two new roles: that of the child, Louison, and her "evil" stepmother, Beline. It will be seen that the dramatic functions of these two new roles are interrelated and, to a great extent, the play's main character, Argan the invalid, is only defined in juxtaposition to them. These women and a third new ingredient-the Oedipal nature of the discourse linking husband to wife-conspire to dismantle that family structure which forms the pillars upon which Moliere had erected his theatrical edifice.

The Sacramental Poetry of George Herbert

Abstract: Since the beginning of this century, critics have been rediscovering the complexity of George Herbert's apparently simple and easy-flowing religious verse. Until the 20th century, critics treated Herbert as a sincere religious poet and little more until someone noticed what he was doing with the form of most of his lyrics. The gentle poet of the tiny church of Bemerton has proven to be a continual source of amazement for those who have bothered to track him in his formal tricks. In some ways, especially in his search for relationships between meaning and form, he is the most baroque of English poets. In a 1968 article, I analyzed Herbert's baroque qualities, using as a jumping-off place Heinrich Wolfflin's famous statement, " ... form must breathe. That is, apart from all expressional differences, the basic notion of the Baroque."' (And we are all acquainted with John Ciardi's famous title: How Does A Poem Mean?) But Herbert went far beyond the usual implications of that concept. Herbert went straight to the heart of the traditional Anglican definition of a sacrament-"The outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace"-and became a highly conscious practitioner of sacramental poetry. In this paper, I will try to show the range of expression he employed in bringing that belief into the construction of his poems. The most obvious examples are Herbert's "Shaped Poems": "The Altar" and "Easter Wings." It is too easy to notice only the usual 17thcentury genre, however, and miss the detailed message that Herbert conveys with his use of the form. "The Altar" has a great many internal messages that are essential to the meaning of the poem. First, of course, is the fact that it is an Old Testament altar rather than a contemporary church altar. It is constructed of stones of natural shape, those cut by God rather than man. There is no cement except the natural cement of tears. "No workman's tool hath touched the same."2 Second, the altar is Herbert's heart, which is a stone so hard "As nothing but / Thy pow'r doth cut." Third, the altar is the poem itself, "this frame / To praise thy

And Yet Another Ring of Echoes in Spenser's "Epithalamion"

Abstract: Few poems in the English language can so unequivocally boast perfection as can Spenser's Epithalamion. To admire it is to appreciate its resounding unity; to analyze its resounding unity is to seek that which forms beauty in literature. Here is a poem that may be approached through astronomy, numerology, mythology, Christianity, literary convention or personal emotion, and still order prevails without ever becoming neat (though critics may try to make it so). To exclude the order that one critic finds in the poem in order to admit another is to do injustice to the poem, for the poem is a celebration of harmony in all aspects of the poet's universe, from his sexual relations with his bride to his worship of his God. And ever since A. Kent Hieatt pointed out that the twenty-four stanzas of the poem correspond to the twenty-four hours of the wedding day, readers have been trying to find new symmetries in the arrangement of the stanzas. While I do not wish to contest the extant theories, I wish to propose an additional one, which corresponds with the structure of the Garden of Adonis section of the Faerie Queene and with certain issues in the Mutabilitie Cantos and which brings to light central themes in the poem which have so far been overlooked.

The Problem of Knowledge and "The Education of Henry Adams"

Abstract: The Education of Henry Adams is widely regarded as an important text exhibiting the rupture-both epistemological and ideological-between classical realism and the post-realist or modernist age. John Carlos Rowe and Hayden V. White, for example, both regard The Education as crucial to our understanding of the transition from a premodernist to a modernist "age" (Rowe) or "ideology" (White).' Similarly, Wayne Lesser has commented recently that Adams "seems to promise a self-conscious incorporation and evaluation of the intellectual endowment of an entire age."2 Focusing in particular on Adams's sense of history, Lesser regards The Education as a "paradigm of disciplinary formulation and professional commitment"; he is especially interested, on the one hand, in the way the text "discloses to itself a subject matter-historical being-only after investigating the basic concepts and intellectual methods by which this subject might be known," and, on the other, in the way it explains, at the same time, "the criteria appropriate for judging the inquiry that generates its discipline-establishing paradigm" (378). While each considers aspects of a modernist ideology operating through the text of The Education, neither Rowe, White, nor Lesser considers the relation between ideology and the more general "problem of knowledge," whether seen from a realist or a post-realist perspective. Thus, looking at "realism," "history," and "language," I shall locate The Education in the gap between the contiguous epochal epistemes that, on the one side, formed both history and the novel and, on the other,

E. P.: Hellenic Punster

Abstract: Pound's punning (paronomasia: to name besides) is witty but rarely humorous.' In simplest terms, his puns are either verbal (different meanings of the same word) or acoustic (words of similar sound but different meanings). Pound's verbal puns do not always involve the conventional dictionary meanings of a word, but instead its more esoteric senses gleaned from the cumulative context of his verse or from the lore of his mind, as if intended only for the initiate. In turn, the poet's acoustic puns occasionally involve words of the same sound and spelling, more often words of the same sound, or more interestingly bilingual associations of sound and meaning. Matters grow increasingly complex, however, when we appreciate that Pound was inclined to "pun" not just verbally or acoustically, but also dramatically and conceptually. Indeed, as his Cantos quest for paradise suggests, he was even trying to achieve an epic, historical, millennial pun of sorts. Such polysemous punning, for Pound, obviously became an ingrained state of mind and highlights his renaissance or Hellenic curiosity within a profoundly Puritan, American, and Judeo-Christian cultural milieu. As for causes, the poet's inveterate word play can be variously explained: earlier influences like Poe and Whitman, friendship with modernist contemporaries like Joyce2 and Eliot;3 a poetics of association, memory, and metamorphosis; imagism and the ideogram; his love of languages and respect for myth (and history); and a preference for synchronic over diachronic modes of narration. Pound's Hellenic punning, then, reveals an insistent desire to persuade his audience, to amuse his friends, and to defend his own poetic program. His punning is serious business, and seems intended to have led to a comic, celebrative, paradisal outcome. Of course, Pound's end was far different, but let us look to The Cantos for a review of the poet's intent as suggested by a medley of his puns. Not surprisingly, Pound was inclined to pun about his paradisal vision in verse long before The Cantos. For example, in "'Blandula, Tenella, Vagula'" (Canzoni, 1911), whose title evokes as a point of departure the first line of the Emperor Hadrian's deathbed address to his soul,4 the speaker seeks to replace "any rumour / Of havens [heavens] more high" with Sirmio as a paradise of "terrene delight."5 Later, in the Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917-1919), Pound's speaker reflects: "'Turn not Venus into a blinded motion, / Eyes are the guides of