China and the West

Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound [ID D22141]. (3)
Sekundärliteratur
1958
George A. Kennedy : Fenollosa's essay is a small mass of confusion. Within the limits of forty-four pages he gallops determinedly in various directions, tilting at the unoffending windmills. Fenollosa was not clear whether the grammarian was one who describe how a language operated or one who prescribed how it should operate. He was fighting to protect poetry from what he viewed as the stifling palm of a grammarian's commandment, one may sympathize full-heartedly with him. No linguist or grammarian elects himself a dictator, nor is he antagonistic to poets. Fenollosa claims the sentence form to be 'forced upon primitive men by nature itself'. This form 'consists of three necessary words', the agent, the act, and the receiver. Since nature is not static, but in constant flux, its movement is an unending transfer of power from one point to another. After settling the natural form of the sentence, Fenollosa discusses parts of speech, and introduces the topic with two brilliant sentences that place him still in this particular regard ahead of our time. His statement is : 'Every written Chinese word is properly and underlying word…'

1970
Akiko Miyake : Pound found in Fenollosa's essay three factors that would reinforce his own theory and justify his practice most assertively. First, Fenollosa justified his belief that the unreality of the ideal, the sole theme in his early poetry, can be presented with solid, definite images. Struggling with hard technical problems of poetry, Pound probably appreciated even the riddle-like assertion of Fenollosa, "The cherry tree is all that it doesAkiko Miyake. Second, Fenollosa justified Pound's partial disagreement with Plato. Supported by Fenollosa, Pound eventually could go beyond his own Occidental tradition. Third, Fenollosa's theory on ideograms suggests the possibility of presenting some definite conception through juxtaposing images. Pound's Imagist works are usually short, one-image poems, because in Pound's definition of the image, the poet reaches the radiating center in his vision only for a breif moment by attaining a sudden release of time-limits and space-limits. If Fenollosa's theory on ideograms that enabled Pound to combine these one-image poems into his magnum opus by giving to these juxtapositions of images conceptual meanings.

1976
Monika Motsch : Ezra Pound übernimmt die Grundidee Fenollosas, dass Sprache, sei es naturwissenschaftlich beschreibende, philosophische oder poetische Sprache, niemals den organischen Zusammenhang mit den natürlichen Prozessen verlieren dürfe, weil sie sonst unwahr und subjektiv wird. Fenollosa bestärkt Pound in seiner Abneigung gegen sterile Abstraktionen und Rhetorik und in seiner Vorliebe für das dynamische Bild. Dies entsprach den Grundsätzen des imagistischen Kreises. Nachdem sich Pound von den Imagisten getrennt hat, entwickelte er seine 'ideogrammatische Methode'. Sie wird häufig mit der Zerlegung der chinesischen Diagramme in ihre Bildkomponenten gleichgesetzt, jedoch ist das nur ein unwichtiger Teilaspekt einer langen, sprunghaften und weitreichenden Entwicklung.

1980
William Tay : The Fenollosa essay had played a very significant role in the formation of Pound's poetics and practice. One of Fenollosa's arguments is that the Chinese language is the closest to nature since its construction is based on pictorial representation. Anyone with some knowledge of the Chinese language knows that this is a most misleading half-truth. To the advocate of a new poetry promoting concreteness in language, this discovery is happily adopted. The Fenollosa essay, with its investigation of an entirely foreign language and culture, evidently affords a resounding, shocking effect which Pound could not possibly get from Dante, the Greek epigram or the Anglo-Saxon poem. I am not trying to discredit some of Fenollosa's insights and contribution, but to draw the attention to Pound's urgent need to instigate and stimulate. Another assertion by Fenollosa is that the radicals of many Chinese words are 'short-hand pictures' of action or process of actions. By combining several pictorial elements to intimate an idea, the ideogram as Fenollosa sees it demands a conscious involvement in the reconstruction of the whole process. If the method is compared with rhetorical techniques, it can be described as, in Fenollosa's words 'a more compressed or elliptical expression of metaphorical perception'. In an ideogram, one certainly does not find any linguistic connectives ; but in poetry, the compression and ellipsis will result in Pound's juxtaposition experiments or the so-called 'unique mode of presentation' of some Chinese poems. The ideogrammic method or the metonymic mode is not limited to Pound's poetry ; it is also employed in some of his prose discourse. Besides the ideogrammic method, Pound has also resorted to other less sophisticated means to arouse his reader's attention. There are even more eye-catching elements for the reader : the parading of Greek tags, the astonishing appearance of a musical score, the striking spatial arrangement of syntax, and the occasional punctuation of the Chinese pictograms.

1993
Cai Zong-qi : The bulk of the Fenollosa-Pound essay is devoted to an analysis of how the Chinese character evokes the dynamic force of nature as a result of its ideogrammic, morphological, and syntactical organization. When they examine 'primitive Chinese characters' (simple pictograms or ideograms), they seek to represent them as 'shorthand pictures of actions and processes'. When they discuss complex Chinese characters (composite ideograms), they argue that two or more ideograms 'added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them.
According to them, Chinese nouns are superior to their counterparts in Western languages because their ideogrammic forms are virtually 'meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots'. They regard Chinese verbs as an ideal embodiment of natural force because they contain no passive voice or copula which might diminish the directness and intensity of natural force. Chinese adjectives are lauded because they are derived from and, in many cases, are interchangeable with verbs. Chinese prepositions and conjunctions are worthy of praise because 'they usually serve to mediate actions between verbs, and therefore they are necessarily themselves actions'.
In focusing their attention on dynamic force, Fenollosa and Pound capture the quintessential quality of the Chinese character in terms of both its etymological evolution and its attendant calligraphic styles. The ability of Chinese characters to preserve and augment the dynamic force latent in its etymological root. This argument has the unintended effect of illuminating how an aesthetic system evolved out of the dynamic force embodied in the Chinese character. The discovery of dynamic force in the Chinese character was truly a revelation to Pound, as it 'seemed to confirm and justify his theories of the poetic image'. Before his discovery, Pound had already been searching for ways to reinvent modern poetry by energizing the phanopoetic tradition in Western poetry. Fenollosa and Pound are aware of the fundamental difference of the dynamic force they saw in the Chinese character and the dynamic force they seek to evoke in their own poetry. When they observe Chinese characters, they stress that the force is natural rather than subjective.
If from the Chinese side one looks for a correct presentation of the Chinese language, one may deplore Pound's 'metaphorization' as a misconception that seems to undo his otherwise insightful understanding of the dynamic beautc of the Chinese character in its formation and calligraphy. If one looks at the same problem from the Western side, one may hail it as a fortunate misconception. Through such a misconception, Pound does not merely render the dynamic beauty of the Chinese character intelligible and relevant to Western poetics but actually makes it a source of inspiration for a wide range of attempts at reinventing modern poetry, extending from his own ideogrammic methods to typographical experiments and to the more radical deconstruction of individual words by concrete poets.

2002
Cai Zong-qi : To correct Fenollosa and Pound's overstatements about the pictorial quality of the Chinese language is a justifiable and necessary task in the teaching of Chinese. It would be a deplorable mistake to dismiss Fenollosa's essay merely because it perpetuates the pictorial myth about Chinese characters. To grasp the literary values of this essay, we must dismiss the overly harsh charge against Fenollosa for his perpetuation of the pictorial myth. Fenollosa cites Chinese characters and comments on 'their semi-pictorial effects' only a few times. Even when doing so, he stresses that Chinese characters are 'based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature ' and that 'their ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action.
The greatest importance of Fenollosa's essay lies in the role it has played in the reinvention of modern Western poetry, a role achieved through the editing and publication by Ezra Pound. The discovery of dynamic force in the Chinese character was truly a revelation to Pound, as it 'seemed to confirm and to justify his theories of the poetic Image'. Prior to this discovery, Pound had already been searching for ways to reinvent modern poetry by energizing the phanopoetic tradition in Western poetry.
To Pound, the essay most eloquently articulated the revolutionary principles of modernist poetry he himself wished to establish. Although he had already formed his Imagist-Vorticist ideals before he read Fenollosa's essay, he sincerely and enthusiastically praised the essay as 'a study of the fundaments of all aesthetics' and credited Fenollosa with ushering in 'many modes of thought since fruitful in new Western painting and poetry. Fenollosa and Pound are aware of the fundamental difference between the dynamic force they see in Chinese characters and the dynamic force they seek to evoke in their own poetry.
In the eyes of Jacques Derrida, Fenollosa and Pound's poetics of dynamic force represents the first major challenge to the entrenched tradition of Western poetics. "[Pound's] irreducibly graphic poetics", writes Derrida, "was with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all its historical significance". In foregrounding Pound's fascination with the Chinese written character, Derrida intends not merely to show the gensis of Pound's modernist poetics. He also attempts to reappropriate the Chinese written character as the other, against which he can pit Western phonocentrism and logocentrism. While Pound identifies the Chinese written character as an ancient antecedent of his imagist-Vorticist poetics, Derrida sees it as convincing proof of the invalidity of all phonocentric claims upon which Western ontotheologies rest. In comparing the Chinese written character to algebra, Derrida reveals a profound ignorance of it. Fanciful though it is, his reapropriation of the Chinese written character reflects a broad trajectory from modernist to postmodernist challenges to the Western literary, intellectual, and cultural traditions. Derrida's view of the Chinese written character, like Fenollosa and Pound's, has been the subject of intense debates. Some critics focus on criticizing Derrida's misconceptions of the Chinese language, especially his problematic assuption of its nonphonetic nature.

2008
James Liu : It is responsible for the fallacy 'common among Western readers outside sinological circles, namely, that all Chinese characters are pictograms or ideograms'.

2010
Xin Ning : By metaphor Fenollosa does not mean merely the figure of speech, which is only another arbitrary subjective process. His concept of metaphor is connected with his theory of the origin of language. The primitive language is the metaphor of nature, which means not only the accumulation of separate, visible objects, but also the unseen truth behind and within all these objects. The pictorial Chinese language transmits the unseen truth to the audience. What needs to be pointed out about this unseen truth is that it is not something intangible at the end of the chain of the abstraction, detached from the world of visible things. Fenollosa openly condemns this kind of pursuit of truth as 'mediaeval logic' which can never be stopped until it reaches the apex 'being'. This truth is deeply rooted in things themselves, and the primitive language, as well as science, makes us reach the thing-as-itself and the unseen truth simultaneously. Modern linguists are entitled to make a strong and well-founded accusation against Fenollosa's emphasis on the pictorial nature of Chinese written characters. Fenollosa actually was fully aware of the fact that 'the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs cannot now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value'. Fenollosa seems unable to accept the fact that picto-phonetic characters play such an important role in Chinese and insisted on the primacy of pictorial elements.
Fenollosa's theory on Chinese written characters not only provided inspirations to Pound's poetic writing and translation, but also to his political philosophy and overall vision of ancient China. Pound developed from Fenollosa's linguistic theory a general approach known to him as 'ideogramic thinking' and introduced it both to his poetic writing and to his English renditions of Chinese texts. This method taught him to rely on concrete and vivid images as well as their free associations in his compositions of poems, and it enabled him to break both the restraints of the formal requirement of conventional poetry and the literal affinity to the original text in the practice of translation to achieve an ideal combination of authenticity and creativity at a higher level.