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

fragments of lost totalities belong to that which is inassimilable within narrow and
deterministic explanations of historical change. That is, they invite the reader to accept
historical discontinuity and fragmentation as the real condition of history. This invitation
is the sinecure gesture in Pound's general hermeneutics of distrust, pace Steiner, that
dismantle staid myths and traditions. Pound and his readers, Steiner argues, collude in
recognizing their mutual ignorance as in the case of Cathay and what Hugh Kenner once
called the invention of China. Steiner writes: “Pound can imitate and persuade with
utmost economy not because he or his reader knows so much but because both concur in
knowing so little” (378).
This trust explains Pound's critical treatment of his sources; it explains how he
used those sources to point out syntactical potentials in modern English and American
speech dialects free from worries of producing accurate translations. Pound's
antiquarianism and his mode of composition spur the critical rediscovery of what would
otherwise be taken for granted – the radical narratological advance that the Ur-Cantos
make in Pound‟s poetic development. A few words about Pound‟s understanding of his
compositional methods in general and the disposition of genetic studies in relationship to
the pioneering work of Jerome McGann concerning the poetic significance of a book‟s
“bibliographic code” preface this chapter‟s interrogation of the importance of the
editorial pre-history of the Ur-Cantos as they come to appear within the milieu of Quia
Pauper Amavi. McGann has argued that Pound‟s poetry, once contextualized through the
materials of the books he produces, must be viewed as inherently critical of their own
moment. It is with that view and its concomitant belief that Pound‟s “catch” holds no real
antiquarian interest inasmuch as they make no attempt to interpret the past on its own
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