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

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CHAPTER FIVE: ―DO YOU WANT ANY MORE OF THIS ARCHAIC INFORMATION ON FOLKS, UP TO 1745?‖: RETHINKING EZRA POUND‘S ITALIAN RENAISSANCE AS DE- PERSONALIZED POETIC PRACTICE If an irony has gone unnoticed it is at least time to mention it here: Benjamin‘s theory of language and its relationship to taboo is predicated upon an inalienable contradiction. The purpose of trauerspiel and modernist expression is to deliver unto natural history its own powers of articulation, free from the taboos that quarantine it in legal possession and title. Modernist antiquarianism, Benjamin tells us, is amenable to our understanding of the way giving ourselves names allows us to participate in the creative capacity of God. Our names are our fate. At the same time, Benjamin argues that the best way to help nature speak so that it might articulate its own name is to enter into the productive context of depersonalization. Benjamin, that is, would have us put ourselves in a situation where we might find the name of fate while, effectively, foregoing our very own. This irony plays itself out to great effect in Pound‘s work: whether through a self-conscious narratological technique in the Ur-Cantos, or by advancing an archaic mode of criticism in Propertius, or by disavowing authorship in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley altogether. Pound would leave the stage of his poetry as if it were the effort of some other force than that of his own authorship. Without having to work out some picayune formalist understanding of autopoiesis – in which it is possible 123
to posit a fictional author being narrated by each poem‘s implied narrator(s) in acts of fictional creativity – we can positively adduce what was actually at stake in Pound‘s de- personalized narratives. This chapter takes Benjamin‘s understanding of the way the symptoms of depersonalization – the self‘s alienation from its body as its emotions become deadened – leads to ―the concept of the pathological state, in which the most simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it lacks any natural, creative relationship to us.‖ What we see occurring in Pound‘s work is his ongoing development of a style that allowed him to play with just this sort of pathology. Pound‘s poetry can be read for how it entertains examples of just this kind of hermeneutic pathology for the end of producing ―an incomparably productive context.‖ Past criticism has often stopped short in its registration of the significance of Pound‘s investment in, and representation of, symbolic acts of augury, believing Pound‘s play with mythical hermeneutics to be Pound‘s actual textual strategy and belief system. In fact, Pound‘s effort to de-personalize his poetic narrative(s) allows him to confront Benjamin‘s irony such that the ―productive context‖ of his work is the real manner through which his poetry comes to be manufactured. That is to say, Pound‘s de-personalized authorship provides him with the opportunity to co- create A Draft of XXX Cantos. The import of the creative friendship that Pound held with Nancy Cunard and the natural history of their relationship is the subject of this chapter. I return to discussing the way Pound‘s de-personalized stance sheds light on Benjamin‘s theory after discussing this history and how it has been variously discussed and misunderstood in recent criticisms of Pound and his often disagreeably difficult politics that persistently obviate his social commitment. 124
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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
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is implicit to baroque criticisms o
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meaning of the poems it collects. P
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Pound's fragments as commentary on
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Few critics read these poems in the
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a diorama booth in which his hero a
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the genetic milieu into which it be
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In fact, two complaints can be hear
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while keeping lines that praise Bro
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Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
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Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82: George Steiner uncovers the ramific
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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
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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
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Page 113 and 114: difference between his intention an
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: ―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
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
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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
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Page 155 and 156: the winners of its game (148). Beca
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Page 159 and 160: to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
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Page 163 and 164: which to describe the force of natu
Page 165 and 166: interrogation of that two-word theo
Page 167 and 168: elationships that they believed to
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Page 171 and 172: knowable “as a combination of ato
Page 173 and 174: new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
Page 175 and 176: ejects any teleological argument fo
Page 177 and 178: Ontologies, such as those that belo
Page 179 and 180: this mystery could only be experien
Page 181 and 182: 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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