상징적 팰러스 찾기와 들뢰즈적 욕망

Seeking the Symbolic Phallus and Deleuzian Desire: The Tension between Centering and Decentering in Pound’s Modernism

Pound, as an eminent catalyst of modernism, promoted radical and experimental literary movements, especially imagism and vorticism, but he revealed some self-contradictions because he still sought to adhere to great traditions. Accordingly, his works show considerable tension and conflict between centering and decentering. Although Pound was very agile in propagating new literary experiments and appeared to be revolutionary, he was also concerned with evoking the best traditions of the East and the West and establishing strong social order. That is, he pursued the fixing of the symbolic phallus in society in terms of Lacan. On the other hand, Pound makes significant contributions to the disorganization of structural thinking or the centered mind. Above all, his decentering motif is presented as the subjugation of syntax to parataxis, and he continually inserts intertextual relationships in the gap made by the collage technique. Basically, he employs innumerable quotations from ancient times to modern times, and from authority figures to common people probably more than he shares his own ideas. His intertextuality breeds not only parody but also indiscriminate hybridity, in which supernatural and historical time are confused and ancient time is intermingled with the daily life of today. Also, various spaces such as DTC, French villages, New York streets, and Chinese mountains are mentioned simultaneously. Another decentering motif in Pound’s works is Deleuzian desire or Deleuzian schizophrenia, which is immanently productive and reproductive as a process and interconnective without repression or Oedipal hierarchy. In general, Pound’s text is so fragmented and disseminated that it lacks the power to cohere all the contents, which makes any structural and linear intervention difficult so that any partial discourse will be excluded and included beyond any limit in it. The movement of text as a desiring machine of Deleuze has all the probabilities that it can be discontinued anywhere and that it can begin and generate anything everywhere. In conclusion, Pound’s yearning for both order and dispersal forms an irresolvable conflict between the vertical and the latitudinal. It offers him some peculiar duality and some uncomfortable tension as well. In general, it represents the self-contradiction and confusion of many modernists. Thus, in a sense, this taut strain can hinder more diverse meanings although the metamorphosis of desire is operating very strongly in the text.