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

Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois historicism blinds him to Pound‘s transcribed
letter in ―Canto XXX‖ and its evidence of the vexed engagement he had with the
Malatesta family. The letter carries a further resonance in that it draws specific attention
to itself as a letter describing the new Venetian print marketplace – an ironic deployment
of a handwritten manuscript. Rainey‘s correlated disdain for touristic-historiography
makes it impossible for him to understand Pound‘s acute attention to a multiplicity of
different kinds of cultural production and communicative practices. If Pound‘s attention
to Malatesta as his retro-fascist hero is mitigated by ―Canto XXX‖ and its remembrance
of the end of the Malatestine dynasty, then it also shows us that as text his Cantos are
necessarily irreducible to narrow thematic approaches launched singularly through the
material clues located in his biography.
In fact, as text, Pound‘s Cantos are just as respectful of the materiality of their
own production (through socialist-inherited alternative publishing) as they are of the
individual bourgeois tourist‘s so-called right to the archive. The biographical details that
Rainey uses to demonize Pound‘s ―bourgeois historicism‖ need to be placed in this larger
context. How did Pound know at all that there were manuscripts of such great importance
that he dare not miss his opportunity to view them in that Rimini library? When Pound
found them, Broglio‘s manuscripts had never before been published: ―Broglio‘s
manuscript was still unpublished in 1923, and because this passage had never been
quoted or transcribed in secondary sources it could be examined only by going to Rimini,
where the original manuscript is preserved‖ (123). As we shall see, the problem with
Rainey‘s rendition of Pound‘s visit to Rimini is that it glosses over Pound‘s expectation
for that trip. Rainey allows his reader to feel indignation over the mean manner by which
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