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

Pound ―discovered‖ the Broglio manuscript but it is Rainey‘s own rhetoric that
determines what the Malatesta Cantos means because he provides only partial evidence
from Pound‘s biography to show the putative unifying effects of the authoritarian
interpretive paradigm he believes Pound to have been advocating. Why do we need to
believe that Pound‘s rancour stemmed simply from his sense of being slighted by the,
perhaps, dilatory habits of a provincial librarian?
Rainey‘s narrative about Pound‘s research in Rimini explores the broader
connections between Pound‘s growing fascination with fascism and authoritarian
interpretive practices; but his is not the only reading of the Malatesta Cantos. Ronald
Bush suggests that the Cantos are universally open to multiple readings, presenting an
archetypal example of Modernism‘s ideological dissonances, inconsistencies, closures,
and openings:
Along with an inclination toward mythic closure, the Cantos
sustain a genuine commitment to radical openness of a kind now
commonly associated with postmodernism. More, a continuing and
vigorous conflict between ideologies associated with openness and
closure, the bohemian and the mandarin, epic and lyric, constitutes
one of the sequence‘s identifying marks. (67)
Bush describes Malatesta‘s role as the ideological face of Pound‘s faith in
authority and how it marks a shift away from the political stance he held in the 1920s:
―Pound‘s interest shifted from London‘s bohemian mix of anarchism and feminism to a
continued fixation with strong and patriarchal cultural forms‖ (76). Bush interprets the
Malatesta mask as a site of ideological indeterminacy.
Even when materialist critics like Rainey and Bush draw substantially different
conclusions from much the same evidence there are yet others who also claim to make
materialist criticisms that focus on evidence of an entirely different sort. George
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