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

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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 47
terms that this chapter wishes to contend. Benjamin‟s theory of language, as it is refracted in the section of The Arcades Project entitled “The Collector,” shows us how best to observe Pound‟s criticial antiquarianism as it serves to reveal the natural history that taboo occludes. ―Antiquarianism‖ is an amenable term to use when thinking about the imbricated figures of the Allegorist and the Collector that Benjamin once described: The allegorist is, as it were, the polar opposite of the collector. He has given up the attempt to elucidate things through research into their properties and relations. He dislodges things from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning. The collector, by contrast, brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects. Nevertheless – and this is more important than all the differences that may exist between them – in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector. As far as the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let him discover just a single piece missing, and everything he‘s collected remains a patchwork, which is what things are for allegory from the beginning. On the other hand, the allegorist – for whom objects represent only keywords in a secret dictionary, which will make known their meanings to the initiated – precisely the allegorist can never have enough of things. With him, one thing is so little capable of taking the place of another that no possible reflection suffices to foresee what meaning his profundity might lay claim to for each one of them. [H4a,1] (Arcades 211) Pound's details, then, wear their invitations to discover their provenance – that to which they refer in space and time – as well as their means of becoming textualized openly, in just the manner whereby Collectors and Allegorists share a relationship to the things that they hold and which hold them in their attention. It is the combination of Pound‘s awareness of an historical detail‘s provenance and the act of fiction that allows for its poetic textualization to occur that make Pound‘s works belong amid the antiquarianist 48
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
Page 3 and 4:
Christopher David Chapman practice.
Page 5 and 6: CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
Page 7 and 8: objectification, while titles are a
Page 9 and 10: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
Page 11 and 12: taboo, as the following remark indi
Page 13 and 14: emind us too hastily only of Benjam
Page 15 and 16: e renewed in philosophical contempl
Page 17 and 18: the word “Title.” I do this out
Page 19 and 20: where fate - the agent of nature‟
Page 21 and 22: Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
Page 23 and 24: come into their meaning through the
Page 25 and 26: meaning in the words he appoints to
Page 27 and 28: ―The Role of Language in Trauersp
Page 29 and 30: God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
Page 31 and 32: conceived of as a pantomime where t
Page 33 and 34: ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
Page 35 and 36: aspects of his linguistic theory th
Page 37 and 38: decision-making powers, we can demo
Page 39 and 40: him to transpose arguments about th
Page 41 and 42: Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
Page 43 and 44: eath of this world, and from it the
Page 45 and 46: magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
Page 47 and 48: elegated to the setting in which th
Page 49 and 50: Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
Page 51 and 52: every locution being, in essence, e
Page 53 and 54: CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
Page 55: dramatic monologue, a feat he would
Page 59 and 60: structural factitiousness that the
Page 61 and 62: is implicit to baroque criticisms o
Page 63 and 64: meaning of the poems it collects. P
Page 65 and 66: Pound's fragments as commentary on
Page 67 and 68: Few critics read these poems in the
Page 69 and 70: a diorama booth in which his hero a
Page 71 and 72: the genetic milieu into which it be
Page 73 and 74: In fact, two complaints can be hear
Page 75 and 76: while keeping lines that praise Bro
Page 77 and 78: Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
Page 79 and 80: Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82: George Steiner uncovers the ramific
Page 83 and 84: to register history differently to
Page 85 and 86: commitment to past modes of critica
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 and 134:
to posit a fictional author being n
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
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
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the political implications of that
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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
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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
Page 185 and 186:
understanding how de-personalizatio
Page 187 and 188:
Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
Page 189 and 190:
WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
Page 191:
The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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