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

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interesting, a rapprochement is necessary in order to confront the conclusions she draws about poetic-subjectivity and impersonality. This rapprochement extends into a wider look at the work of Virginia Jackson who shares similar critical pre-dispositions to Blasing and Cameron in her discussion of lyricism and subjectivity. Listening closely to the phonemic play in the Cantos for the "lyric" connections that lie outside their content, Blasing values Pound's poetry for its ideological "fluidity" but regards it to be the accidental by-product of his intent. Her theories of ―metaleptic‖ subject-formation, caused by the ontological priorness of the "mother-tongue," and the ensuing protraction of authorial intention to what it is that constitutes the "real" history that delivers this tongue, allows her to dismiss Pound's avowed intentions to demonstrate historical repetition and the details that illumine the actual conditions that he may have thought to be governing cultural production. Here is the conclusion she draws after reading Canto 71, an Adams Canto: The prevailing defense of the Cantos is that its epic openness and polyvocality save the poem from being a totalitarian text, which, in the standard reading, is aligned with "lyric closure." But we always only hear other voices as edited by Pound. My argument is that lyric language, which is "open" to a different history, keeps the poem ideologically fluid. The text has a kind of negative capability because it allows language to organize in a fashion that undoes tendentious messages. To motivate the signifier, the lyric listens to the words otherwise, and if we listen to words otherwise, we hear a different Adams - or, more accurately, different Adamses - than the one he [Pound] would like to leave for the record. (Lyric Poetry 161) Blasing draws new implications from the timbre of Pound's ―voice,‖ at the expense of his intent: "[b]ut we always only hear other voices edited by Pound" (162). Whether this is true or not is beside the point. Pound's version of subjectivity makes the 103
difference between his intention and what he edits moot. Blasing pursues her own definition of subjectivity in her discussion of lyricism and the construction of the lyrical "I," by making use of the poetic figure of metalepsis and two different regimes of signs, adopted from Lacanian psychoanalysis. She has us understand that the lyric "I" constitutes itself in its breaking away from, or "transumption," into the Other. That is, in Lacanian terms, the subject breaks free from the closure of her Imagination of the Real to instantiate a position within the Symbolic, the residuum of culturally recognized significances and positions with which the subject must negotiate. For Blasing the empirical Real is that stage in which an infant acquires his or her unique version of the mother-tongue through processes of imitation and mimicry. This imitative babble becomes the eventual ground from which unconscious memories form a lyrical "microrhetoric." It is this pre-conscious mimicry which motivates the maturing poet in her confrontation with, and eventual transumption into, the Symbolic order. Poundian babble plays a different tune, Blasing argues, from his intention, caught as he is within a microrhetoric that shapes the poem: Thus lyric language shapes the poem's development and arguments at a different level than the patterns that subject rhymes or the repeats in history provide. The poem is convincing because these larger patterns, "rhymes," and repeats by which Pound would organize his tale are grounded in another kind of patterning that does not work by argumentation and "proof-bringing." The repetitions, patterns of sounds, rhythms, and syntax, make for the "persuasion" of Pound's form as they train the reader to "see," imagine, desire other kinds of links, in the same way that one is moved to connect the different senses of rhyming words. (157) Neither the content of the historical repetitions Pound finds nor the choices over what parts of the record Pound edits, and interprets, are of significance to Blasing. This is understandable, perhaps, as she is concerned only to trace the presence of the mother- 104
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
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Christopher David Chapman practice.
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CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
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objectification, while titles are a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
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taboo, as the following remark indi
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emind us too hastily only of Benjam
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e renewed in philosophical contempl
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the word “Title.” I do this out
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where fate - the agent of nature‟
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Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
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come into their meaning through the
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meaning in the words he appoints to
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―The Role of Language in Trauersp
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God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
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conceived of as a pantomime where t
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ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
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aspects of his linguistic theory th
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decision-making powers, we can demo
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him to transpose arguments about th
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Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
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eath of this world, and from it the
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magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
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elegated to the setting in which th
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Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
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every locution being, in essence, e
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CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
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dramatic monologue, a feat he would
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terms that this chapter wishes to c
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structural factitiousness that the
Page 61 and 62: is implicit to baroque criticisms o
Page 63 and 64: meaning of the poems it collects. P
Page 65 and 66: Pound's fragments as commentary on
Page 67 and 68: Few critics read these poems in the
Page 69 and 70: a diorama booth in which his hero a
Page 71 and 72: the genetic milieu into which it be
Page 73 and 74: In fact, two complaints can be hear
Page 75 and 76: while keeping lines that praise Bro
Page 77 and 78: Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
Page 79 and 80: Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82: George Steiner uncovers the ramific
Page 83 and 84: to register history differently to
Page 85 and 86: commitment to past modes of critica
Page 87 and 88: modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
Page 89 and 90: the case, is deliberately making ou
Page 91 and 92: Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
Page 93 and 94: delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
Page 95 and 96: presence of a continuous patina of
Page 97 and 98: described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
Page 99 and 100: 10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
Page 101 and 102: obsessive desire most critics find
Page 103 and 104: passing from hand to hand, becomes
Page 105 and 106: Propertius as Propertius once had C
Page 107 and 108: saw no viable future for his own ex
Page 109 and 110: then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
Page 111: ‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
Page 115 and 116: itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
Page 117 and 118: subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
Page 119 and 120: his subjectivity as a blend of fact
Page 121 and 122: eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
Page 123 and 124: dogmatic binding and over which to
Page 125 and 126: Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
Page 127 and 128: Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
Page 129 and 130: apostrophe to ‗Misery‘ performa
Page 131 and 132: ―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
Page 133 and 134: to posit a fictional author being n
Page 135 and 136: neither Rainey‘s Institutions of
Page 137 and 138: y Piero della Francesca. Pound was
Page 139 and 140: E gradment li antichi cavaler roman
Page 141 and 142: that have not traditionally been co
Page 143 and 144: The library of the dukes of Milan w
Page 145 and 146: Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
Page 147 and 148: Bornstein, for example, is interest
Page 149 and 150: the meaning of Pound‘s text by co
Page 151 and 152: Do come, do come. I can see us at B
Page 153 and 154: the political implications of that
Page 155 and 156: the winners of its game (148). Beca
Page 157 and 158: iography and how he can be seen to
Page 159 and 160: to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
Page 161 and 162: view of Pound‘s political beliefs
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which to describe the force of natu
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interrogation of that two-word theo
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elationships that they believed to
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commemoration is to writing (Derrid
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knowable “as a combination of ato
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new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
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ejects any teleological argument fo
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Ontologies, such as those that belo
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this mystery could only be experien
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attention to the way names effect t
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Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
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understanding how de-personalizatio
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Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
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WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
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The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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