> My contention is that the notion of "the
> Western Civilization" would not have emerged (nor would it remain now) but
> for the East India Company, plantations, etc. -- in short, colonialism &
> imperialism.
To rephrase this: "Western Civilization" (unlike proper historical abstractions) does not name any actual set of social relations but is an ideological label for the military, economic, and social power of the United States capitalist class. Any attempt to define "western culture" will be either an obeisance to a fetish *or* (which is about the same thing) an arbitrary and ostensive definition by listing its (supposed) elements. The arbitrariness is shown, for example, by the sharp difference of opinion over jazz expressed by two left analysts and defenders of the concept of Western Civilization -- Adorno and Jason Schwartz. Now if this is true, Gandhi's reported wisecrack would seem to be a simple statement of an empirical fact: there is no western civilization.
The beautiful lines Yoshie quotes from the *Cantos* may help us here. Those come from a Chinese history of China (from a Confucian standpoint) translated into French in the 18th century by a French Jesuit. In other words, a certain "China" was part of the definition of "Western Culture" from the period in which "Western Culture" was invented. They are written in a metric which Pound invented first for a translation of another piece of pre-western civilization incorporated into that civilization in the 19th century, the Anglo Saxon poem The Sea Farer, and then combined with a Latin metric (that of Ovid and Propertius) in his first major attempt at a definition of "Western Civilization": Homage to Sextus Propertius.
>From The Sea Farer:
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed With spray on his pinion.
Not any protector May make merry man faring needy. This he little believes who aye in winsome life Abides 'mid burghers some heavy business . . .
And from Propertius:
SHADES of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas
It is in your grove I would walk, I who come first from the clear font Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy,
and the dance into Italy. Who hath taught you so subtle a measure,
in what hall have you heard it; What foot beat out your time-bar,
what water has mellowed your whistles?
Which are then combined in Cantos I and II.
Canto I (a translation of a renaissance latin translation of that first "western" poem, the Odyssey, the story of the first "western" wayfarer, Odysseus:
And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas ........... Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officini Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And in Canto 2 Ovid (celebrating that great rummager of the "western" past, Robert Browning) joins the chorus of the pre-western colonized as western:
Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one "Sordello." But Sordello, and my Sordello? Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana. So-shu churned in the sea. Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash, Sleek head, daughter of Lir,
eyes of Picasso Under the black fur-hood, lithe daughter of Ocean; And the wave runs in the beach-groove: "Eleanor, _elenaus_ and _eleptolis_!" (Greek script)
And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat, Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices: "Let her go back to the ships, Back among Grecian faces . . . . ............................................................... And by the beach-run, Tyro,
Twisted arms of the sea-god, Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold, And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents over them, Glare azure of water, cold-welter, close cover.
And all these ghostly voices (Homer, Ovid, the Sea Farer poet, Propertius, Andreas Divus, Japanese) are NON-western voices being incorporated into "The West" in Pound's great celebratory ode to fascism and u.s. imperialism. "So-shu churned in the sea": the churn turns liquid cream (chaos) into solid butter (order), as out of the chaos of the pre-capitalist world the East India Company created order, as out of the chaos of the pre-European u.s. Kit Carson (one of the minor heroes of the *Cantos*), a modern odysseus, brought order, as Pound by a great act of will tried to make it all cohere. In the end (Canto 116) he must admit:
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
who can lift it? Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me And I am not a demi-god, I cannot make it cohere.
Those who want to defend "western civilization" as an empirical or historical reality, not an ideological invention, will find their arguments all dramatized for them in the Cantos. And nothing, I think, makes clearer than (against Pound's intentions) the Cantos do the essential artificiality of the concept. Yoshie is correct. Western Civilization is an invention of the East India Company.
Carrol
P.S. Just before starting the Cantos Pound perhaps had it right:
There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.