TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

saw no viable future for his own experiments in modernist expression. This reading, then,
is also a consideration of that criticism that registers the poem, and Pound more broadly,
as an archly difficult example of modernist impersonality. Rather than having to retain
the anterior authorial consciousness that is implicitly at play in these theories of
impersonality, it is possible to read Hugh Selwyn Mauberley according to the stance
Benjamin felt was necessary to making modernist expression tangible. That is, Pound
discovers in 1920‘s Mauberley, after his preliminary work with finding the correct formal
position from which to adopt the stance of a de-personalized narrative. Pound discovers
something like the incredibly productive formal context that the ―deadening of the
emotions, and the ebbing away of the waves of life‖ that Benjamin ascribes to de-
personalization.
Max Saunders‘ magisterial treatment of the relationship between biography and
modernist aesthetics, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of
Modern Literature, has refocused contemporary critical energy over the formal and
generic grounds upon which theories of impersonality have been raised. While his thesis
that ―the autobiographical is central to modernist narrative, and never far from the surface
even in the extended poetry of Pound or Eliot,‖ and his ensuing readings, including and
especially of Pound‘s Hugh Sewyn Mauberley, does provide an interesting coincendental
instance of the way names and titles influence one another, a puzzle yet remains (12).
Saunders writes, ―In autobiographical fiction, the protaganist‘s name is not (or at least
isn‘t usually) ‗one‘s name,‘ but someone else‘s‖ (5). The undecidability of how much is
fiction and how much is fact in Mauberley, is left, simply, that – undecidable. Without a
theory of language that allows for the way names and titles interact, theories as eloquent
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