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

the genetic milieu into which it becomes organically forced and worked into a particular
work's script. Pound's practice seeks to avoid the usual progress whereby an ―exogenetic
detail‖ is run aground by the organic mimetic world that governs and structures the
work's text. The structural advantage Pound gains in allowing his details to fore-go their
role as ―demonstrative‖ of a work's preset theme is that of being free to disregard
problems of authority and narration, properly the interests of textual scholars, for a
writerly space in which the genetic forces of scripting are allowed to display their
gestural inauguration. Pound sets the indeterminacy of each fragment at odds against any
proleptic organizing structural intention. Authorial personality, once these strictures of
text are discarded, becomes just one of many fragments competing within the milieu of
the draft‘s intentional horizon.
It is the structural decision to subtend authorship to the veracity of the realist
fragment that allows Pound to adopt Browningesque personae while avoiding ―any
unifying principle – tonal or thematic unity imposed by a single mind.‖ Past critics, and
this is certainly the position taken by Ronald Bush in his explanation of the genesis of the
Cantos, have argued that Pound's solution to the problem of the singular narrating
consciousness was much different. Bush views Pound as having agonistically multiplied
his narrators, each competing for some share in the general explanatory authority of the
Cantos.
Bush's explanation is indeed paradigmatic of the ―impersonality‖ school of Pound
criticism, indebted as it is to the authorial attitude, commitment, and style of T.S. Eliot.
Bush reminds us that it was Eliot who asked Pound to consider excising lines 103-119
from ―Three Cantos.‖ These lines were in Pound's own ―voice.‖ In lines 103-119, Pound
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