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

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In other treatments of Ezra Pound‘s modernism, a number of tensions and paradoxes have arisen within attempts to account for the meaning of his difficult lyrics. For example, what has counted as the legitimate object for materialist apprehension seems to shift according to each critic‘s belief in the significance of an author‘s politics, as their modes of institutionalized ―pre-reading‖ come up against poetry that is often wilfully esoteric. Nowhere are foregone conclusions more apparent than in materialist readings of Ezra Pound‘s early Cantos. These Cantos have been especially open to politicized reception as they are understood to focus on the Renaissance warlord- condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta, and were written at the moment of Mussolini‘s rise to power. Pound‘s reputation leads critics to see his interest in Malatesta as a logical symptom of his fascist sympathies rather than, for example, as the outcome of his fervent admiration for an Italian culture that has historically supported the arts. Mussolini was only one potential inheritor of this largesse. Thus the problem with common materialist readings led by Pound‘s reputation is that they tend to avoid the real complexities of Pound‘s personal politics, evident in the conflicting habits of his being at once a ―causeur‖ – a kind of muckraking provoker – and a poet sensitive to the implications of textual appropriation. This latter habit, in particular, asks that we understand him as a socialist cultural producer, while acknowledging that any materialist approach to modernist aesthetics is going to have to deal with the crucial question of what ―counts‖ as the ground for materialist criticism. Lawrence Rainey and George Bornstein have authored the two most important attempts to read Pound‘s work through reference to material realities. However, in part because of certain blind spots in their apprehension of the relevant material archive, 125
neither Rainey‘s Institutions of Modernism nor Bornstein‘s Material Modernisms have adequately studied A Draft of XXX Cantos for how it forces us to reconsider Pound‘s politics. ―Canto XXX‖ offers an important coda to Rainey‘s reading that needs to be included in our apprehension of the Malatesta Cantos for how it refines what was most important in Pound‘s engagement with this figure. The classic location for studying Malatesta is Cantos VIII-XI, first published by William Bird in 1925 at his Three Mountains Press, as a part of A Draft of XVI Cantos. Sigismondo Malatesta‘s role as a military leader is featured explicitly in ―Canto X‖ and it is this Canto that has rendered the most damning evidence in those arguments surrounding the relationship between Pound‘s biography and his poetry. Institutions is exemplary. It reads Pound‘s interest in fascist politics through the representation of Malatesta‘s powers of divination in ―Canto X‖; just as Malatesta can read the portents in naturally occurring phenomena – e.g.: the flight of an eagle – for their direct effect on the success or failure of his military ambition, so can Mussolini intuit the real needs of Italy and the most efficacious means for their achievement. However, ―Canto XXX,‖ published in 1930 by Nancy Cunard‘s Hours Press in A Draft of XXX Cantos, offers the reader a much different way of understanding Pound‘s interest in the Malatesta family that puts pressure on this received bit of wisdom concerning the relationship between Pound‘s interest in Mussolini and Malatesta. Rainey examines with a great deal of sedulity the details of Pound‘s biography and how they illuminate the published page. In particular he is interested in discussing the politics of Pound‘s ‗discovery‘ of a manuscript in Rimini – the so called ―Broglio‖ manuscript – that describes the history of the Malatesta family. Institutions of Modernism has so dominated our recent reception of them that Pound‘s interest in the Italian 126
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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
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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
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 and 112: ‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
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 and 132: ―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
Page 133: to posit a fictional author being n
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
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
Page 169 and 170: commemoration is to writing (Derrid
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
Page 183 and 184: 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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