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

of Propertius). The signature of authorship is a meaningless event for genetic critics
working on authorial drafts. Authorship, they argue, makes sense only if publication is
introduced as the overriding logic and principle of the organic growth of the text.
Geneticists study drafts for their usefulness in locating moments when objects of
authorial interest – either of their own device or citations from other sources – move from
being probable avenues for further development into more regulatory schema, guiding
large-scale directions and thematic affinities in a text's development. Geneticists posit
textual teleologies without finalist, authorial, supposition. They focus on the
appropriation of empirical potentialities by the organic forces and processes that go on to
eventuate textual unities. Theirs is the study of the struggle between inspiration and
appropriation:
Rough drafts demonstrate perfectly how, even for the most realist
of writers, the will to referential veracity remains secondary to the
organic primacy of the work: selected first of all for its realityfactor-value,
the exogenetic detail is forced into the original
context of the rough draft; but as the endogenetic logic develops,
the writer can be seen abandoning, one after the other, over the
course of the composition, all the realist characteristics that had
been the initial reason for choosing such a demonstrative detail. As
it meshes better and better with its context, the detail sometimes
ends up becoming utterly unrealistic, if it doesn't simply run
aground. (Pierre-Marc DeBiasi and Ingrid Wassenar 46)
What Pound accomplishes is an extraordinary upset of the ―organic‖ force of his
own work's primacy when he rejects Browning's monological narrator for the ―realist
characteristics that had been the initial reason for choosing such [a] demonstrative
detail[s].‖ Surveying a broken landscape of historical time, Pound transforms the usual
logic of textual appropriation described by DeBiasi and Wassenar that obtains between
the realist detail, open to verification in the referential world from which it is drawn, and
61