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

It is with the question of allobiography for what it suggests about impersonality
that this chapter deals. The play with naming and titles that occurs in this poem can be
read in such a manner that the author‟s hero, Mauberley, is not he with whom the
focalization of real biography is shared. Rather, Pound‟s technique in this poem allows
him to share his own authorial consciousness with these same “others” that impinge upon
the imaginary consciousness of Mauberley. It is this invention that makes Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley a de-personalized poem, one that allows Pound to approach a condition where
his fate is acknowledged and overcome, as he bids farewell to London, allowing it and its
own natural history to speak through the poem‟s actual author, the representative of
London‟s effete avant-garde, “E.P.”
The consequences of such a reading of Mauberley, one where the forces of natural
history share the stage with Pound‘s authority, has a direct impact on recent readings of
Pound and upon the issue of impersonality more generally. Saunders‘ thesis depends
upon a kind of essentialism that allows personhood to be performed and imitated: Pound,
that is, ―impersonates‖ imaginary voices. Before returning to the problem of Mauberley
to demonstrate how I see Pound using aesthetic language to de-construct or de-create his
personality, it is important to deal with theories of impersonality that continue to work
from an essentialist bias. Mutlu Blasing, Sharon Cameron, and Virginia Jackson provide
eloquent important and eloquent defense for the disposition underlying Saunders‘ thesis.
Their work on the issue of voice and subjectivity, like Saunders‘, has prepared the ground
for understanding what is actually at stake in reading Pound‘s work after Benjamin‘s
sense that de-personalized language can de-construct taboo. Saunders is surely correct
when he suggests that ―Pound‘s self might, at least in a poem such as this, be another
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