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

structural factitiousness that the titles belonging to a standard history use for
instantiation.) Attention to the way tone, disposition, and the implied context from which
each fragment has been appropriated for how it plays off against the greater serial
structure of the narrative renders an authority in Pound‘s texts that approaches the
condition of expression that Benjamin associates with the de-personalized stance
necessary for allowing natural history to speak. This is possible inasmuch as these
fragments undermine the logical systems in which they appeared as ornamental proofs
within a pre-given system of cultural knowledge while also thwarting the serial structure
of the current poem in which they are being newly embedded by mitigating its essential
cohesiveness. The materials of philological provenance thicken the poetic medium, as
Jerome McGann shows in his study of the poetic medium in Textual Conditions, but they
leave us knowing that the forces that compel historic change are incomplete and
unreliably known by the way their textual exemplars display ambivalence when they
become dislodged from their contexts. Traditionally these fragments might become
subject to the allegorical profundity of the Allegorist who replaces original authorial
affects with a spectacular explanatory idea. The hermeneutic procedure that Pound‘s
poetic promotes serves to register a fragmented concept of historical understanding,
eroding those myths of continuity and causality that pretend themselves as the essence of
nature and history. It is this strategy of disbanding the interpolation of allegorical
authority over each fragment that allows Pound‘s efforts to let him de-personalize his
poem for the sake of natural history. Pound achieves this form in the Ur-Cantos.
Jerome McGann has other means to explore Pound‘s poetics that illuminate what
is at stake in this form. The Textual Condition and Black Riders focus on the
50