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

delirium of self-hood that my understanding of Pound‘s de-personalized poem requires.
To hazard a summary, if rational languages ―depend upon a prior material
language‖ [Blasing] and that material language is the object of a person‘s self-making
that ―stresses self-ownership‖ as Sharon Cameron suggests, then the scene of writing, as
Jackson theorizes it after Dickinson‘s address, presents a spectacular problem. How can
we believe that modernists who write such that the predicating impersonal subject,
regardless of the difficulty and imagination of their focalizing agent, can ―slip from cause
to effect‖? Dickinson‘s poem, in fact is a precursor for just this inverted agency, available
in Mauberley, a poem that thematizes:
A consciousness disjunct,
Being but this overblotted
Series
Of intermittences
Which is to put the question about what actually appears in the poem and its
empirical reference to the test. Is it ―overblotted‖ or a ―series/ Of intermittences‖? The
question is worth asking, remembering the difference between the Deleuzian and
Lacanian theories of subject formation that Blasing asks that we entertain, one in which
thresholds of our understanding language are broken-through, and in that breaking,
constitutive of different forms of subjectivity, and the other in which ―partial objects are
not the expression of a fragmented, shattered organism, which would presuppose a
destroyed totality or the freed parts of a whole‖ (326 Anti-Oedipus). Blasing, of course,
described the assemblage of partial objects in terms of a ―body language‖ that
―remembers the history that creates its gaps‖ (8). When Pound decides to publish his
poem anonymously as E.P., he takes on the similar narratological position as Dickinson,
writing a poem in which the conduits of self-expression are hostile and appropriative. As
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