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

story he uses to make sense out of the empirical data, just as Browning had favored
endogenetic cohesion over historical veracity. The Allegorist‘s story may be left
unfinished or open, but its permanence as a story remains tethered to implacable concepts
that prescribe how the story is told – deep structuralists, as it were. In contrast, Benjamin
discusses the Collector and her fetish for completion. Every new object in the collection
forces this sort of antiquarian to anxiously rethink the terms that govern that collection. If
the explanatory concept that governs the story by which their collection is explained is
foiled by new evidence, then that concept is disbanded and replaced. The Collector is
made the model for the materialist historian, who, unlike the Allegorist, is concerned
primarily to give the things comprising their collection their ontological status as
exogenetic things and not symbols within a proleptic narrative. The Collector is driven by
their commitment to the essential otherness of history. The Allegorist, and here
Benjamin's ―Angelus Novus‖ is perhaps a good shorthand instantiation, revels in the sight
of history's anarchic dissolution of things, understanding all objects to be the umbra of a
conceptual figure that gives them being and of which they can only be revealed through
mimicry. While being antithetical poles in Benjamin‘s thought about how history could
be displayed, the Collector and the Allegorist inform each other‘s identity in the insoluble
similarity that lies dormant in their motivations toward concepts and completion. They
each, as Benjamin theorizes them, take an interest in the past, collect its disjecta, because
the world from which it is transported no longer exists.
Pound's materialism can be understood as just such a species of the antiquarian
bias that Benjamin‘s arrangers betray, with its commitment to historic veracity over the
lineaments of mimetic convention (as we saw in the last chapter) and with its
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