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

then, these imaginary aesthetes were Pound‘s/Mauberley‘s ―Contacts,‖ then that portion
of the poem that describes a ―Life,‖ Saunders suggests, is, formally, an objective
treatment of the imaginary biography of ―Mauberley,‖ the eponym appointed to the
whole poem‘s second sequence. It is here, though, that Saunders‘ formalist approach
reaches a threshold in its explanatory possibilities.
Saunders claims that two versions of imaginary biography are at work in the
second sequence, giving it its objectivity and overall coherence. The ―Mauberley‖
section‘s ―metabiography‖ has Saunders locating the third voice of the belletrist in the
parodic note signaled by Pound‘s title for the entire poem. This voice criticizes the over-
sincere genre incorporate to the flattery regimes of late 19 th century biography. i The
metabiographical element in the poem‘s second sequence is Saunders‘ primary argument
for the ―Mauberley‖ section‘s coherence and objectivity. Archly formal in its
appropriation, metabiography posits the invented belletristic author, ‗E.P.‘ This is
something of a less interesting argument than the second mode of imaginary biography
Saunders finds at work: ―allobiography.‖ Saunders would have us understand Pound to
be writing in a free and indirect style that fuses an external narrator with ―Mauberley‖‘s
consciousness. Saunders innovates here, and imagines that Mauberley is not a unitary
consciousness, (as Ronald Bush asserts), but a composite:
By ―allobiographical‖ I mean that the ―objective‖ presentation of
Mauberley draws upon, or can be connected with, biographies of
other people – real biographies rather than the imaginary one of
Mauberley. It is not merely a matter of lives, but of the aesthetic
activities and standpoints of other people as well. (406)
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