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

Pound's fragments as commentary on their moment only serves his work partially.
Calling the Cantos a feat of reflective criticism helps rationalize the eventual decision to
leave them outside of any possible consideration for a new, albeit mimetic, critical
edition. Perhaps this is wise. An edition of the Cantos that reprints Caroll F. Terrell's
annotations to the Cantos would be useless. Furthermore, as we have seen, McGann finds
positive uses for the current state and nature of Pound's publications, if only that in their
current conditions they draw a precise line to that which must be restored through further
materialist criticism of Pound's texts. Not attending to the mimetic order of his poetic text
is, however, not a fair option.
Reading Pound's textual fragments as being connected to the socio-material
continuum from which they extend, become inscrutable, and end as implacable mysteries,
is as much as to argue that they belong to Benjamin's dead and buried past as they do to a
potentially recoverable future. Pound's poetic collections are as much acts of
antiquarianism as they are criticism. The Cantos, on this scale, offer cure beside
diagnosis. The protocols for reading Pound's works then, either through the knowable
certainties of the bibliographic code or, by way of a hermeneutic that is sensitive to the
name/title distinction, reflect differing uses and emphases of Benjamin's theory of
language. At stake in that theory, as we saw in the first chapter, are two kinds of history.
The one form of history belongs to the Collector, who finds a new title under which to
organize the preciosité of every new thing he finds, and the other, belonging to the
Allegorist, who finds new ways of describing his collection by adapting his name for that
collection to suit its irregularities. Antiquarianism, on this score, becomes the act of
grappling with the past through understanding both the strangeness and provenance of its
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