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

historical moment. Pound‘s antiquarianist disposition changes the temporal accent of his
criticism from being sedulously pointed towards the present. Benjamin‘s theory of
language allows for a hermeneutic approach, rather than a reflective approach, to Pound's
work that illuminates the poetic significance of his bibliographic code. Pound‘s poetic
practice alters and returns to his titles that which they would naturally occlude were they
not thoughtfully considered. McGann may argue that by virtue of the mode of Pound's
expression, the significances of his narrative fragments are destined primarily to foment a
critical awareness of the social, political, and economic milieu in which his works
participated, rendering Quia Pauper Amavi, for example, a complicated form of
complaint. For McGann, the deictic accent of Pound's texts, available through a reader's
sensitivity to the currency of particular uses of book-making traditions, is always set to
the immediate ―now.‖
The ―footnotes, bibliography, and other scholarly paraphernalia‖ of a critical
edition are beguiling to the imaginations of Pound scholars eager to wrench the Cantos
from their infamous capture by their venerable publisher, New Directions, withstanding
their new but unimaginative re-issues of earlier publications. Pound‘s fragmented
narratives premise themselves on the way they take their anti-mimetic titles as their
predicating condition. Without a hermeneutic lens that can observe them, titles like Quia
Pauper Amavi (A Lume Spento needs obvious work) occlude concepts that might be used
to describe alternative interpretive horizons. The modern fragmented narrative, in
Pound‘s hands, implies a hermeneutic that must conjugate at once the sociomaterial
continuity of the thing against the conceptual fragmentation that underwrites the ―real‖
history that those things would appear to be referring themselves to. However, reading
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