THE COUNTERFEITERS

HUGH KENNER. "The Counterfeiters' first appeared in the Winter, 1966 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review.

This is about Campbell's Soup, J. P. Morgan, Friday's footprint, William Ireland, and Stephen Dedalus, with a side glance at Albrecht Durer's cat, if he had one; the critic needs a good deal of apparatus nowadays. Before longing for simpler times he should reflect that when things were really simpler there were no critics. Critics came into existence when the nature of what artists were doing ceased to be quite clear. Formerly the artist did a job someone wanted done: decorated churches, or kept the records of the tribe, or glorified the Medici, or glorified God. Homer beguiled kings, Shakespeare fed actors, even Tennyson persuaded the restless prisoners of Victorianism that they were not alone (though Tennyson, unlike Homer or Shakespeare, was surrounded by critics, for reasons we shall look into.

Such jobs entailed apprenticeship, of which we have records. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1484) meant that the thirteen-year-old Albrecht Durer had spent an afternoon investigating the way of bringing together what he knew about drawing and what he could see in a mirror. "Artist," in that time of innocent looking, was simply a word to designate the sitter for an exercise which might on a different afternoon have been performed with the artist's cat. Durer the craftsman sees nothing particularly mysterious in Durer's face, though there is much that is mysterious in his ability to draw it.

Rembrandt rather more than a century later takes more interest in the fact that he is looking at himself. When Rembrandt does "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," his attention is divided between the marks time has placed on that face since it last gazed out of a mirror, and the visible tokens, around the eyes and mouth, of something in which Durer seems to have taken less interest: this man's unique mysterious selfhood. There is no sign however that he is engrossed, or means us to fathom his engrossment, in the face of a unique type of man, the creative physiognomy. He is a unique man, no more, than each of us is. What he invites us to study is a face, Rembrandt's face, but not an artist's face. He is a craftsman, like Durer, meditating on the transiencies of being also a man.

The next famous "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is not a picture but a book. I find it suggestive that the title goes out of its way to suggest analogies with a picture, while the very last line on the last page, the pair of dates, stresses divergences. Far from reproducing the conditions of Durer's afternoon with his own face or his cat's, this book was written between 1904 and 1914, while the author was aging from twenty-two to thirty-two, and concerns itself with a subject likewise in continual transit, from babyhood to about twenty. The mirror, if mirror there be, is the mirror of memory, and what appears in it is a being called The Artist. We are being shown what The Artist is like when he is a young man, whether the artist's name is Joyce or Wilde or Shelley or Spender or Poe, though probably not Durer or Rembrandt; the scope of the word "artist" had been suddenly much enlarged a few decades before Joyce's birth.

As a young man, we are told, the artist is different from other young men, because he is a different sort of being. Indeed he may grow so preoccupied with that difference that he will never produce any art, as a look at Stephen Dedalus may suggest. When his difference has been properly validated, Joyce suggests that it resembles a priest's vocation, and his job will be to act as "a priest of the eternal imagination," transmuting, thinks Stephen, "the bread and wine of common experience into the radiant body of life everlasting." Those of us who consume that body (and Joyce, by no accident, speaks in "Finnegans Wake" of his readers as consumers) will presumably derive from the transmuted experience benefits not obtainable from the experience in its unconsecrated state, when we perhaps merely lived it, just as the bread which has been transubstantiated in the priest's hands feeds the soul though formerly it was fit only to feed the body. This gives us reasons for tolerating and feeding the artist, differences and all, and reasons similar to the ones Catholic Dublin invariably gave for tolerating and feeding its innumerable priests, who were also pretty unsettling company, and contributed quite as little as does the artist to the health of Dublin's economy.

It is easy to recognize here the Shelleyan artist, trumpet who sang to battle and unacknowledged legislator of the world, though Joyce disliked battles and, having looked at legislators with a colder eye than Shelley's, provided a more deliberate metaphor, neither prophet nor king, but the third member of that romantic triad, the priest. It is less easy to recognize any artist with whom we are familiar today. Prophet, priest, and king, all three have lost their symbolic potency, the potency which inspired Shelley and Joyce, who disliked all three, to regard them as functionaries who had usurped the true prerogatives of the artist.

A half-century after Joyce's "Portrait" was finished, our society in considerable anguish of conscience devises for its artists sinecures and foundation grants, and shelters them in its secular monasteries, the universities, while the artist on the other hand claims no access whatever to sacerdotal mysteries. There is something very business-like about the way he goes about his activities. It is true that his activities continue to scandalize the popular press, which was equally scandalized in the time of the first Roosevelt by the activities of businessmen. That is because the artist has taken over the role of the business man, who used to call himself a builder to whose concerns the profit motive was peripheral, though he could also be overheard damning the public. Like J. P. Morgan, a Picasso or a Dali may make a great deal of money, and seem to be coining it out of the air, so elusive is the service he performs. Or he may make none. But, again like Morgan, he spends his life performing actions against which no one can frame a rational protest, but which make the public (whenever it notices ) extremely uneasy. We pay people to excoriate him for us from time to time, because we feel he is meddling with some collective secret we would rather not know about.

With the tycoon pretty thoroughly imprisoned by tax laws and corporate structures, the artist has stepped forward as the last entrepreneur. And indeed he is engaged at something almost too scandalous to think about. I am going to suggest that he is a counterfeiter. That, oddly enough, was the other thing Joyce called him. Stephen goes forth, we all remember, to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, and Joyce glosses the verb "forge" when Stephen reappears in "Finnegans Wake" re christened Shem the Penman, a name drawn from the title of a Victorian melodrama about a forger. Shem's chronicler goes so far as to call "Ulysses .... an epically forged check upon the public," and we are only beginning to realize how thoroughly counterfeit is the "Portrait" itself, that book which passed for so long as autobiography.

The hellfire sermon, for instance, was not something Joyce heard in the chapel but something he bought from a pamphlet-rack. Of course, the symbolic union of forger and priest may reflect Joyce's doubts about what actually happens when the words are spoken over the sacramental bread. But it is generally better, in examining Joyce's meanings, to keep his personal history out of mind. As usual, he saw very deeply into what interested him, and in linking the functions of priest and forger freed his thought from his mere time, his mere Shelleyan afflatus, and brought it to the heart of anything an artist does.

The artist makes something that is like something else, and yet, not being the thing it is like, exudes a magic to which, whatever our sophistication, we can never grow really indifferent. If we were really indifferent we should not tolerate critics. All art, our critics have taught us, from a time before the bulls in the cave at Lascaux, comes from magical beginnings, about which we vainly guess. The Aurignacian draftsman, like the sculptor at Luxor, may indeed have been a kind of priest, and was certainly a kind of forger. I want to look at the persistence of these concepts into an ecumenical time, when the priest has less status than the social worker, and the forger is merely a technician.

For as the forge of Dedalus has become in modern times the skill of the penman, so the artist, who used to make things that were wanted, like a blacksmith, has come to make things we cannot think why we want, such as reproductions of Campbell's Soup tins. Hence arises what connoisseurs of impasse will one day call the Warhol Situation, after Andy Warhol.

Warhol, who began by imitating soup labels with consummate skill, apparently contemplated a progress from painting to sculpture, in emulation of his colleague Jasper Johns, who had turned out a Ballantine's beer can in solid bronze. This artifact, for which a large price was immediately paid, differs from its original, within the limits of the artist's skill, in only two particulars: it is much heavier, and it contains no beer. But Warhol cast no bronze. For it suddenly appeared that the Campbell Company, which up to that time had let us think that its business was to feed its customers and its stockholders, was actually engaged in a massive counterfeiting operation. It was flooding the supermarkets with cheap imitations of an Andy Warhol sculpture, and before the sculptor had so much as gotten to work.

The entrepreneurs who deluge us with cheap Mona Lisa's had at least the grace to wait until da Vinci had finished. Warhol in turn, having over da Vinci the advantage of being on the spot, was equal to the challenge of mass production. He took to carrying home from the supermarket dozens of the 17 cent imitations, which he proceeded to autograph and place on sale at a price established, as all prices are, by the free market. This proved to be $6 per can. It is clear that Mr. Warhol now has the Campbell Soup Company working for him, part-time at least. It should also be clear that he has posed a neat epistemological problem. For the dream of Zeuxis, at whose painted grapes the birds pecked, is fulfilled at last; the gap between the artifact and the thing represented by the artifact seems virtually closed. It was a Greek dream, that Pygmalion's statue might be conceivably so lifelike it could start to move; it is an American reality, that sculptured soup cans, complete with the sculptor's signature, will if punctured yield real soup.

According to the official theory of representational art, during every one of the 20,000 years since the first bull was drawn on the wall of the first cave the creative imagination has labored to achieve this result, the artifact indistinguishable from its object. One would therefore expect sounds of hosannah from the custodians of this theory: at the very least, a testimonial dinner for Andy Warhol, jointly sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon press and the custodians of socialist realism, the main course perhaps soup instead of peacock. We hear instead ungrateful mutterings.

Pygmalion, it is alleged, had to make his statue, whereas Warhol did not make his soup tins. It is difficult to be impressed by this argument. If Pygmalion's statue was in bronze, as important Greek statues were, then it was made at the foundry, as Rodin's were. Rubens operated a factory so skilled it would be difficult to prove he ever touched a brush to numerous paintings conventionally called his, the work of the great nineteenth-century illustrators Dor'e and Tenniel is known to us by way of engravings not a line of which they executed, and Alexandre Dumas pe're with his loft full of apprentices perfected the art of issuing whole novels without lifting a pen. No one can deny that the actual shaping of the artifact has frequently and without scandal been delegated to someone with more time or more skill or better facilities than the man who conceived it, and if we are in search of a concern with the skill and facilities to execute perfect Campbell's Soup cans we need not look further than Mr. Warhol did.

The stubborn question remains, by what alchemy the Warhol signature transformed those tins into display pieces (and multiplied their value 35-fold ). We may not be able to find a better analogy than Joyce's; by the imposition of the signature, not yours or mine but someone's whom fame had already linked with soup labels, as by the utterance of words of consecration, not by you or by me but by someone duly ordained, the mere sensate thing undergoes a change which does not affect its physical or chemical properties in the slightest; yet collectors' money has been spent to testify that something has altered. It is even possible to designate that change; in the beginning was the Word, and from being an object the can became an utterance. It became a kind of statement by Andy Warhol. The signature did exactly what a signature does when an executive at Campbell's affixes his own to a letter composed by his secretary. The signature makes the letter a thing uttered by him. Previously it was a typographical doodle confected out of quotations from other letters: dear sir, in reply to, on the other hand. So the signature on the soup tin transforms it from a mere item of commerce into a slight but irreducible, complex, somewhat facetious utterance having to do with the status of the artist, the nature of art, the autism of a culture that buys what it eats unseen and then looks at nothing it buys, photo lithographed abundance, conspicuous non consumption, and the long history of artifact as counterfeit.

For we need not compose our utterances so long as we endorse them. There are moments to which only a quotation is adequate; and the soup can, signed, may be said to quote one phrase from the stuttering monologue of our beautifully adept machines. And Warhol's gesture in quoting quotes a gesture of Marcel Duchamp's, who about 1906 signed an ordinary snow shovel and placed it in an exhibition of sculpture. And that deed had in its time a different meaning from Warhol's, since its context was not mass-produced abundance but a floundering strife against snow. Both artists invited men to look at some common thing seldom looked at, but the meaning of each invitation is inflected by the context in which it is issued. The object itself at which we are to look is in some respects of minimal importance. Context conveys much, and so does signature. I want to consider now what happens when the signature is tampered with.

Like every other aspect of the Warhol Situation, the importance of the signature on the soup can points up problems that have been latent in the Western psyche ever since, in the seventeenth century, it slowly became aware of art as art. That awareness synchronized with, and may have been caused by, the ascendancy of empirical philosophies. And no sooner had the Life of the mind begun to make a virtue of radical empiricism which assumes that we are to discern things while pretending to ourselves that we do not know what they are then two related consequences became inevitable.

The first consequence was that what the schoolmen used to call accidents, the skin of coherent appearances, became all that there was to know, since the senses stop at appearances and the rules of empiricism forbade the mind to leap past the senses. The second consequence was that works of the imagination became an impediment to orderly knowledge. It became clear for the first time that there existed, testifying too much human effort, a phenomenon called Poetry, consisting of statements not borne out by careful observation. Thus John Locke was forced to conclude that whereas the Judgment separates and classifies what the senses deliver, the poetic faculty, which he calls fancy, can only blend and confuse, which is amusing but not enlightening.

Such playthings, in the childhood of the race, were understandable, but these times call for men of judgment. The response of the magicians, who since Paleolithic times have had the imagination in their keeping, was characteristic. A fraternity who in various periods have disguised themselves as moralists, as flatterers, as church decorators, had no difficulty now in disguising themselves as men of judgment. And perceiving that the world in the man of judgment's head is an orderly counterfeit of the world by which his body is surrounded, they became counterfeiters. The first notable triumph of the new esthetics of fraud was The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, written by Himself. It is a lucid orderly work, devoid of those appurtenances we can no longer defend: fables, expressions drawn from ancient writers, excrescences of rhetoric. The word is attached to the object, not to "Literature" or to the adjacent word. The very savages are certified by anthropology. The flaw in this work seems almost too trivial to mention. It is merely that Robinson Crusoe never existed.

We had better examine this strategy very carefully. Unless we perceive the exact scope of the counterfeiter's operations, we shall go badly astray. What we have here, first of all, is the book Robinson Crusoe would have written, if he had existed. This follows directly from the primary dogma of empiricism, that our knowledge is not of things but of their traces. We can see the apple, but it may be wax; luckily we have a sense of taste as well. We can see the bear's footprint, but unless he is standing in front of us we cannot be sure about the bear. Our senses show us only marks in the clay, and some skilful person may have molded them. If you can have the footprint without the bear, you can also have Crusoe's life without Crusoe. Crusoe also saw a footprint, but could not usefully assume it was forged, since to postulate a forger is still to postulate a second man. The reader is meant to respond to Crusoe's book exactly as Crusoe responded to Friday's footprint: he is to assume,, that the system of reality accessible to him contains one more man than he had previously surmised.

Second, we have a sophisticated consequence of the empirical habit of detaching words from the persons uttering them. Words, the philosophers kept repeating, are labels we gum onto things; grammar is a set of rules for combining words, which ideally would imitate the combining properties of things; and a language is simply a (disorderly) collection of words and a (haphazard) set of rules, most deplorable but capable of being tidied up somewhat by method. Fictions, in the past, were generated by rhetorical devices, that is, by some ferment within the language itself; but order does not ferment. So be it; we shall write out "Robinson Crusoe" fact by fact, and stuff it with catalogues of things all accurately named; word shall follow word as event would have followed event; and to what end? To this end, that the language will stubbornly coalesce not about these facts but about a person, a person who does not exist.

And thirdly, we see what happens when we try to explain away Warhol transubstantiating soup tins or Picasso metamorphosing a toy car into a baboon's head by protesting that magic is cheap and that the true artist is really a craftsman.

The craftsman theory, to put it shortly, assumes that you know what the artist is going to do (translate Homer, for instance ) and then watch closely to see how well he does it. It is easy to understand that the minute he does something unexpected he and the theorist are in separate but equal difficulties: he because he has lost touch with his public (a public trained not on art but on the theory ), and the theorist because he has lost the use of his criteria, and carries on as though an invisible hand had removed his trousers.

Such scandals are familiar. But the craftsman is never really under control even when his hand is moving as we expect. For to ask him to do what has been done before is to ask him to counterfeit something, and the counterfeiter is never doing what we think. We see him bent over his table, and imagine him bent on the manufacture of an object, resembling a $10 bill as closely as his craftsmanship will permit. We suppose that forgery is an exercise in craftsmanship. It is not. It is an exercise in creative metaphysics. What the counterfeiter is imitating is not the bill but the moment when that bill was (we are to suppose ) issued by the Treasury of the United States: not a visible thing but an invisible event: perfectly invisible: it never happened.

This grows quite clear if we consider the Shakespearean forgeries of William Ireland, which passed for a while as high tragedy. He did not forge plays; he wrote plays; and he wrote bad ones. "Vortigern: a Tragedy" is "Vortigern: a Tragedy": absurd and unreadable. William Ireland did not counterfeit "Vortigern: a Tragedy." What he counterfeited was the (alleged) occasion on which those acts and scenes, those speeches and rhythms, were composed by William Shakespeare. The text is manufactured, as all texts are, with paper and ink. The created thing, so long as the forgery stands, is not the text but an incident in Shakespeare's biography. Ireland was really a kind of historical novelist.

In the same way Daniel Defoe (whom we have not hitherto mentioned, since it is more convenient to imagine him as amanuensis for the syndicate of magicians) wrote "Robinson Crusoe" but forged a book "by" Robinson Crusoe and counterfeited Robinson Crusoe himself. The counterfeiting went on all the time he was writing the book; the forgery occurred on the moment when he elected to omit his own name from the title page. In so slight a moment, as Adam learned, is the world altered. For to be told, poker-faced, that it is not the fabrication we would gladly accept, but the very thing that is normally fabricated-a memoir, a testimony-this somehow changes a book, even when we do not believe what we are being told about it. We shall be enquiring into that "somehow."

A remarkable story by Jorge Luis Borges invites us to consider several pages of manuscript written, at the cost of unimaginable spiritual contortions, by a twentieth-century Frenchman. These pages are identical word for word with several pages of "Don Quixote," a work composed with considerably less trouble by a sixteenth-century Spaniard. And the Frenchman's pages, says Borges accurately, though literally identical with the Spaniard's, are almost infinitely richer. As they are, so long as we see behind arranged words the act of a man finding and arranging them, and do not suppose that these words were simply copied.

I have said that we cannot imagine the spiritual contortions of Pierre Menard, who in modern Paris was driven to express himself in Spanish, and in antique Spanish, and in locutions whose every contortion bears a strained and oblique relation to any values with which we are familiar. And it is doubtful whether we are in the presence of intelligible art, if we cannot imagine what a man went through to produce it. But this fiction of Borges presents a hypothetical extreme case, as uninhabitable as the summit of Everest. Like the summit of Everest it can serve as a vantage-point. From that vantage-point look back over the decades after Defoe, and behold an entire civilization preoccupied with contortions like those of Pierre Menard, who counterfeited from Don Quixote. It is not only the time of Ireland's "Vortigern," Chatterton's "rowdy," and MacPherson's "Ossian," three borderline cases, but of outright and cheeky fraud on the one wing and of an esthetic of imitation on the other. Fake antiques were being manufactured wholesale in Rome for sale to travelers as Greek and Roman artifacts; a famous picture shows, hanging in their frames, dozens of other famous pictures, the very details of their brushwork microscopically imitated; epics and mock-epics imitate the "Aeneid" and one another; pastorals imitate the "Eclogues" and Satires imitate Horace; Pope transposes to new language Homer and Donne; everyone subsequently transposes Pope; and George after George, the First, the Second, the Third, is transmuted by not always ironic alchemy into the Emperor Augustus, who himself had transmuted himself into a god. Many things have been said about Augustan civilization. We can say one thing more, that related as it was to a philosophy which detached appearances from realities, a science which was learning to read gone history by looking at mute present objects, and a cultivated class preoccupied with knowing simulacra of the prestigious, it was engaged as men were never to be again with massive experimentation governed by the esthetics of fraud. Perhaps its principal masterpiece is a forged travel book complete with forged maps, introduced by a cousin of the non-existent author who discusses the principles upon which he deleted from the manuscript thousands of words that were never written; we learn from it what horses talk about and how men make shift to counterfeit horsey virtues. The man who conceived it earned the undying gratitude of his countrymen for exposing, under an assumed name and in an assumed character, a scheme for flooding Ireland with counterfeit halfpence, and in his will he endowed a mental hospital. We cannot wonder that eventually the cult of sincerity had to be invented, to give us breathing space before Andy Warhol.

But our breathing-time has passed, and now the whole topic is back, its relevance reinforced by our immense proficiency at reproducing things, and by our simultaneous doubts about the value and meaning of personal identity. Accustomed as we are to the form letter, the mechanically reproduced signature, the edited Congressional Record, the doctored tape recording, the Xerox copy, the color photograph, the Van Gogh sunflowers in reproduction with the very texture of the canvas simulated, the documentary film every scene of which has been carefully staged, and the millions upon millions of identical soup tins out of which we nourish bodies containing glass eyes and gold teeth, we are fascinated by synthetic spontaneity and by the subtleties of things that are not quite themselves. Joyce perfected a prose meant to look as though no one had composed it, a prose seemingly the exhalation of its subject, behind which the artist should disappear, "aloof, indifferent, paring his fingernails." This prose lays upon the page glimpses of things and persons actually seen, snatches of conversations actually heard (hence the fallacy that the key to Joyce's work is somewhere in his life); for "he is a bold man," Joyce wrote to a prospective publisher of "Dubliners," "who will dare to alter in the presentation what he has seen and heard." From this there follows his image of artist as priest, changing nothing of his materials except their use. And this invisible artist presiding over a mystery, for all his trappings of fin-de-siecle romance, seems closely related to Defoe and Swift, who also pretended not to exist.

Or consider the invisible artist whose esthetic was elaborated in the 1920's, the film director. The Russian director Pudovkin describes an experimental sequence made up of five shots: 1. A young man walks from left to right. 2. A woman walks from right to leave 3. They meet and shake hands. The young man points. 4. A large white building is shown, with a broad flight of steps. 5. The two ascend the steps. The pieces, separately shot, were' assembled in the order given and projected upon the screen. The spectator was presented with the pieces thus joined as one, clear, uninterrupted action: a meeting of two young people, an invitation to a nearby house, and an entry into it. Every ,single piece, however, had been shot in a different place; for example?, the young man near the G.U.M building, the woman near Gogol's monument, the handshake near the Bolshoi Theatre the white house came out of an American picture (it was, in fact, The White House), and the ascent of steps was made at St. Saviour's Cathedral. What happened as a result? . . . By the process of junction of pieces of celluloid appeared a new filmic space without existence in reality. Buildings separated by thousands of miles were concentrated into a space that could be covered by a few paces by the actors. second conclusion Pudovkin's book was written in 1927. Nearly four decades later its shoptalk has become common property. Everyone in the movie-house knows, when he isn't surrendering himself to the illusion, that location shots and studio interiors have been combined to make Paris or Sinkiang or Shangri-la out of a few glimpses of California real estate. The point to stress is that everybody does know it, and that this affects our sense of what movies arc, just as psychoanalysis is affected by all its patients having read Freud, and "Robinson Crusoe" is affected by our knowledge that Crusoe novel' existed, and "Gulliver's Travels" by its context, unknown to contemporary readers, among the collected works of Jonathan Swift. We know, moreover, that no one in particular is responsible for these effects, that movie technique is necessarily as collective phenomenon as the Marxist theoreticians of the twenties could have wished, and that when personalities are mentioned they are apt to be as synthetic as Santa Claus, or Vico's Homer. Alfred Hitchcock on the, one hand is hugely the creation of his press agents and on the other hand neither produces nor directs the television series that bears his name. We know such things, and are not really disillusioned; they comport with an esthetic of fraud which in turn is continuous with what the newspapers call reality, presided over by Betty Crocker and a chief executive with a suite of ghosts.

We are tough habitues of the counterfeit, in fact, and from this one may draw three useful conclusions. The first has to do with the prophetic power of the imagination, even when it does not invest itself in Shelleyan robes; for the literature of Defoe's time, and Swift's, and Pope's turns out to have been perfectly accurate social prophecy, examining the workings of new technology to create an image of what a technologized civilization would look like. Swift was the Zola of a future in which we communicate by holding up objects ( with our names signed to them) and finance projects for talking to chimpanzees or dolphins.

The second conclusion has to do with the anomalous resurgence, amid so much skilled fraud, of an underground consecrated to the personality: a cinema, constantly raided by the police, for which individuals with names and addresses have held the cameras and cut the film, or a poetic of the untamed, practiced by people whose dissent from the consumer economy forbids them to use razors or buy shoes. That this underground, despite precious detailed triumphs, appears to lack the imagination to accomplish anything of sustained interest, should cause no surprise. Not only is it a conforming underground, its members expending such pains oil details of costume and behaviour that they are as easy to identify as so many pelicans, it is also an underground that in trying to dissent from the present is dissenting from history, and so from history's chief lesson for the artist, that he gains his freedom by seeming to do as he is told. In a counterfeiting time he will be careful to counterfeit.

For (this is the third conclusion ) the innovating energy of our time commenced with its rediscovery of the methods of eighteenth-century imitators and forgers. Joyce forged an autobiography and then imitated Homer; Eliot imitated Elizabethan drama; Pound put together a synthetic Latin classic.

All three, simultaneously, affected to be imitating the mere surface confusion of their time's public and social life. In their lives they played roles: the bourgeois father, the banker, the American bohemian in Europe. That Yeats elaborated the theory of the mask, that Pound's third and twenty-seventh published volumes are both called "'Personae," that the eighteen sections of "Ulysses" are written in eighteen different styles as though to acknowledge theories of a multiple Homer, that a note to "The Waste Land" invites us to find all its personages melting into one, and that the poem is packed like the official poetry of a time when poetry is dead, with numbered lines and footnotes: these will no doubt seem to the eye of the future details as endemic to our age as the rites of forgery and masques of identity that strike our attention in the literature of the Augustans.

If we are to learn to see our own time with the eye of the future, we shall have to recognize the strategies of counterfeit for what they are, understanding that the counterfeiter imitates not things but occasions; that the work's historical context is part of its meaning, and more intimately so than its author's life; and that nothing can blind us so effectively as the fallacy of the Intentional Fallacy. To pretend, so many decades after Defoe, that the artist is best considered as a craftsman, and the work of art as mute as a Windsor chair, yielding up nothing but empirical information, is to ignore the lesson of generations of counterfeiters who restored the personal to a blank universe by seeming to suppress the person.

The soup can that became an utterance might have been contrived to refute this fashionable hypothesis, so comforting to critics and so frigid for artists. What the artist's mere signature does is transform the soup can into a sort of word, totally inexplicit, totally assertive, inexplicably permanent.
A word comes from a person, who intends it.
A soup can is a soup can, in a different and less accessible universe.