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

and interesting as Saunders‘ must repeat the problem of voice in formal terms, leaving
impersonality a refined but reductive approach to those texts that theorists and critics
interested in modernist expression choose to argue from. Modernism, after Benjamin‘s
understanding, has to be that writing which is best suited to deconstructing the taboo that
titles create, allowing for the kind of de-personalized fate that natural history, being
neither nature or history, signals in its attempts to locate for itself an apt name.
In fact, Saunders‘ study of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley complicates the problem by
finding a new, third, voice, beside those that might be imagined as belonging either to
Pound or Mauberley, to consider as a possible narrator. Saunders theorizes that there
exists a belletrist/ literary memoirist at work in the poem. He places a particular emphasis
on the poem‘s title when he reminds us that it was never Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,
simply, but Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (John Rodker‘s Ovid Press
[London], 1920). In 1949, when Pound had other worries such as escaping indefinite
imprisonment at St. Elizabeth‘s Hospital, his collected works appeared. The title in this
issue was simplified, leaving out the appositive ―Life and Contacts.‖ Important enough
was the full title to Pound that it reappears in the 1958 reprinting of the collected works,
appearing, as it stands today, as Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Contacts and Life.
Pound‘s corrected title for the 1958 issue of his collected work gives Saunders the
lead in his formal approach to the poem and the ensuing discovery of this third voice.
Saunders explains the poem‘s first sequence as belonging to the genre of imaginary
biography (finding its closest accompaniment in Max Beerbohm‘s Seven Lives) in which
Pound invents a number of imaginary aesthetes – E.P., the woman of ―Yeaux Glauques,‖
Monsieur Verog, Brennbaum, Mr. Nixon, Lady Valentine – for satirical treatment. If,
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