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An Essay Concerning the New Critical Edition of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound’s “’Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.’

New York: FordhamUniversity Press, 2008.

Robert E. Kibler,

MinotStateUniversity

For nearly a century, Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” has served as the foundation for modernist poetic visions great and small, despite its somewhat dubious claim to a basis in fact. Donald Davie called it the “only English document in our time fit to rank with Sidney’s “Apology,”with Shelley’s “Defense,” and Wordsworth’s “Preface,”despite critics such as George Kennedy labeling it a “mass of confusion” and Andrew Welsh noting that at best the work generates “suspicion” in literary critics.

Now there is a critical edition of Fenollosa’s “Chinese Written Character,” edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein, published by Fordham University Press in August 2008. It is a beautiful book, offering the original manuscript in newly set type, and full of scholarly explication of the intellectual history of the work, its aesthetic and critical implications, and Pound’s editing of it. The edition also offers readers a clear view of Ernest Fenollosa’s intellectual life, and this will be fresh news for thosewho only know him through an interest in modernist poetry or in Ezra Pound. Indeed, Fenollosa is the star of this critical edition, emerging as a writer and a thinker deeply engaged in a quest to understandChinese and Japanese poetics, and committed to a grand vision of an East-West cultural fusion. The edition also shows how Pound ensured that Fenollosa’s language theory conformed to his own modernist vision. He also divested the theory of Fenollosa’sold fashioned prose style and sensibility.Never has this change been shown with such clear evidence in place to confirm it.

Chapter I, entitled “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” serves as the extensive scholarly introduction to the Fenollosa manuscripts which largely comprise the rest of the edition.. It situates the “Chinese Written Character” in the tradition of twentieth century American poetry and poetics. Author Haun Saussy discusses the ways inwhich the historical value of the text remains secure, so long as we know where, exactly, to place the work. He suggests that its ultimate value is perhaps best determined by the desires of its “interpretive community.” Until the 1950s and 60s, Saussy notes, that had long been “a community of one.” For better than fifty years Pound took the “ideogrammic” model of precise and clarified thinking as the valid one for use by poets and craftsmen of all kinds.

Chapter I also relates the history of Ernest Fenollosa’s development as a thinker, walking the reader through the process by which the “Chinese Written Character” came to finished form in Fenollosa’s October 1909 notebook, and how Pound denuded it of flowery language and imagery. Pound in 1915 may have rightly seen such language and imagery as caught in the general “muzziness” of late Victorian England, but Saussy notes that had Pound known more about the East, he would have also recognized Fenollosa’s Buddhism conditioning the work. We are led by Saussy to witness the “Bodhisattva spirit” as Fenollosa followed it, quite separate from Pound’s own understanding of the “goddambuddhists.” Saussy describes Fenollosa’s initiation into the philosophy and practice of mystical Tendai Buddhism, and relates how much of what became his influential language theory has its roots in the Kegon, or “FlowerOrnamentalSchool” of Tendai philosophy.

Saussy also covers the influence of “The Chinese Written Character” both on the development of the avant-garde, and its intellectual treatment at the hands of contemporary literary theorist. Pound had struggled to get the work published in September and Decemberissues of The Little Review in 1919. He published it again in his Instigations of 1920, and then as a stand-alone in 1936, with a new preface and an appendix of “Some Notes Written by a Very IgnorantMan.” But John Kasper’s re-publication of the 1936 edition in 1951, and especially, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s continued publication of it beginning in 1964, brought the work to a wide audience. It quickly found a niche among artists and poets, becoming hip and important.As Saussy notes, the Objectivists, the Black Mountain writers, the San Francisco Beats, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Cage, Snyder, Ginsberg, and many others felt the influence of “The Chinese Written Character” on their art—even if as a language theory it was considered flawed by scholars because the Chinese ideogram did not actually function as a picture of a thing or of things.

Indeed, there seems to have been a passing of influence from artists to scholars in the late 1960s. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for example, recently recalled that as a poet in the 1950s and early 1960s,he was deeply influenced by “The Chinese Written Character,” but that as flaws in the language theory became more prominently discussed, its influence on himlater waned. Yet literary critics such as Jacques Derrida warmed to the “Chinese Written Character.” Derrida brought it to the attention of literary theorists in 1967, celebrating Fenollosa’s work as in the tradition of a material poetics with the power to “unsettle” culture and art in ways that “science or philosophy cannot.” Saussy quotes Haroldo de Campos as supporting Derrida’s reading of the disruptive value of the “irreducibly graphic” ideogram in 1977, a form “neither vocal nor mimetic,” serving “neither speech nor representation,” aliving example of the “heroic age” of international concrete poetry.

Chapter II, entitled “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica,” offers the complete text as published by Pound in 1918 and 1936, including the appendix, “With Some Notes by a Very IgnorantMan.” In the margins appear Pound’s notes with reference to the “plates” from Fenollosa containing Chinese characters in translation. The layout puts Pound’s notes to the side of the text, with ample white space, making them a more obvious part of Pound’s textual dialogue with his readership and with Fenollosa’s text. In contrast, the edition published by Ferlinghetti’sCity Lights Presssince 1964 always has these notes small and at the bottom of each page.It also omits Pound’s introduction and all prefatory material. Presumably, poets and artists only need the text itself.

Chapter III presents “The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry” in its circa 1906 draft form, as Fenollosa left it, along with Pound’s notes from his 1914-1916 reading of the text. In this manuscript version, as in subsequent others, Saussy, Stalling, and Klein offer Fenollosa’s handwritten notes in roman type, his deletions marked in strike-outs, Pound’s deletions in boldface brackets, and his marginal comments in boldface. Editor’s queries or insertions appear in curly brackets. This plan makes evident how much Pound deleted from Fenollosa’s text, as well as the kind of material deleted. Further, Fenollosa wrote on the right hand side of his notebooks, leaving the left hand side free for notes and commentary. The editors keep to this habit, thus showing Fenollosa’s own running dialogue with his text to good effect.Facsimiles of the manuscript also appear sporadically throughout the chapter, often in direct relation to the type-set version, so we see the original next to its type-set copy.

Chapter IV presents a “Synopsis of Lectures on Chinese and Japanese Poetry,” from Fenollosa’s notes of 1903. It is followed by Chapter V, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol II,” of the same year; Chapter VI, Fenollosa’s 1892 lecture on “Chinese and Japanese Traits;Chapter VII, “The Coming Fusion of East and West” of 1898; and Chapter VIII, “Chinese Ideals,” a lecture from November 15, 1900. All chapters show the degree to which the vision of an East-West fusion consumed Fenollosa,his personal style as a writer, and the literary links he sought between writers from the East and the Aristotles, Shakespeares, Johnsons, and Greys of the West. In Fenollosa’snotes and commentary to these representative manuscripts, the man himself emerges, worried about the neglect of small shades of meaning by translators, considering that he ought to give more examples here and there, bemoaning the general ignorance of Botany and how it hurts our poetic sensibility, and concerned that dictionaries only offer meaning “sandpapered down,” to suit the desire of their creators. The edition ends with Pound’s 1958 “Retrospect on the Fenollosa Papers,” and an extensive bibliography.

From the beginning, Fenollosa dominates this critical edition. He appears as anambitious young man, recruited just after Harvard to teach at the Imperial University of Tokyo. While there, he studies ink brush painting with Kano Hogai, last master of a renowned family. He delves deep into mystical Buddhism, taking instruction from Sakurai Keitoku, abbot of the Tendai monastery at Miidera. In 1886, aged 33, he transfers to the newly created position of Imperial Commissioner of Fine Arts in the Ministry of Culture, and along with several of his former students, begins to catalogue Japanese art treasures. He also purchases art for the Boston museum, returning to the United States in 1890 to become curator of its Asian Art collection.

In 1895 Fenollosa divorceshis wife and then marries his assistant at the Museum, Mary McNeil. This development resulted in the need for him to leave Boston and begin a second career as a consultant, lecturer, and author. He returned briefly to Japan, and took up the study of Chinese poetry with former student Ariga Nagao, and with Professor Mori Kainan of the ImperialUniversity. The notes from these sessions made up the largest part of Mary McNeil Fenollosa’s gift to Pound in 1913, after her husband’s death in 1909. The rest came from those lectures, articles and drafts Fenollosa wrote during what Saussy calls his peripatetic period, living off summer classes taught at Winona Lake, Indiana, and lecture gigs in museums, art circles, and Chautauquas primarily held in the Midwest, where his divorce was not such a scandal.

After Fenollosa’s return to the United States and to a new life, he wrote many notes to himself, pep talks, as it were, as well as drafts for more lectures and different courses of professional action. “I must remember…[that] I am an incarnation of a man of Western race,” he writes, “bound to do my part towards the development of Western civilization.” “I ought to be a leader of people…[and] must demonstrate my right to be a power in the world of philosophical opinion.” Sounding very Poundian, he also notes that his success would depend on recognizing that the function of art “must be duly subordinated to, or synthesized with, all efforts toward moral and political construction, the problem of the world’s suffering, sin, and disease.”

It is Fenollosa’s vision of the morality of art, and especially of a future art morally embodying the strengths of both the East and the West that fired his ambitions, and Saussy points to publications in Atlantic, Harpers, and other less known journals as ancillary proof, while Fenollosa’s poem entitled East and West, read at his Harvard class reunion of 1893, serves as exemplar of the vision. In it, Asia is associated with artistry, and the West with profit, technical efficiency, and a general “spiritual poverty” that can be overcome through a “future union” with Asian values.

The “Chinese Written Character” as we know it grew out of lectures and notes from Fenollosa’s peripatetic period, and is in evidence in mostly unfinished drafts, beginning with his 13 October 1900 “Chinese Poetry Notes.” These were followed by several other attempts at a synthesis through 1903, all of which only vaguely inform his finished product. On July 10, 1903, however, at WinonaLake, Fenollosa began a notebook under the heading “Notes that may be useful in expanding the lecture on the Natural Poetry of Language.” This was followed by a second and a third notebook in which the famous cherry diagram and a discussion of sounds, words, categories, stanzas, and rhymes in Chinese poetry appeared. The fourth notebook, labeled by Mary McNeil Fenollosa, “E.F.F. “The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry” was given to Ezra Pound bearing the date, October 1909—though Saussy believes it written in 1906

This fourth notebook has Pound’s 1916 editing marks visible in black and red crayon, in strong contrast to the light pencil in which Fenollosa typically wrote. Saussy, Stalling, and Klein add Pound’s deletions back to this text, so that readers can follow the strange one-sided dialogue between Fenollosa and his editor. What did Pound remove? Fenollosa’s opening discourse on the “peoples of continental Europe,”and the “future of the Anglo Saxon supremacy,” goes. So too his celebration of an “American education system” that has initiated Chinese Studies in California and New York. None of Fenollosa’s notes on sound, grammar, or comparative word forms survived the cut. His various diagrams or illustrative examples of Chinese and Western versedid not survive. So too fell a variety of recurrent metaphors Fenollosa used for beauty and artistic unity--the “halo group”--as Saussy terms the lot. Yet these discursive generalizations and poetic illustrations, especially, as well as the halo group of figures and metaphors, were the very substance of Fenollosa’s vision of an East-West fusion, and Saussy rightly notes that their omission from “The Chinese Written Character” constitutes a major reorientation” of the text.

Pound knew what he wanted. The Imagist poet who urged his fellows to “go in fear of abstractions” in 1913 would see his own ideas embodied in ideograms. They modeled the language of the concrete, unlike Fenollosa’s own nineteenth century prose, and served as the guarantor of linguistic and thus cultural health in Pound’smind. Saussy quite reasonably suggests that Pound’s belief in the ideogram“pointed forward” to every major development in his career. Vorticism, theCantos, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, the imbalanced fascist radio broadcasts—all came of Pound’s defense of “ideogrammic civilizations” against the onslaught of human ills—imprecise language, murky art, usurious economic practices, et cetera. Readers of Pound generally know the list.

All told then, this new critical edition will whet in readers an appetite to know more about Ernest Fenollosa, and goes far to ennoble his “Chinese Written Character” as a defining work of 20th century poetics. There are, however, a few small points of criticism worth mentioning. For example, the editors could easily have offered readers the means to compare Pound’s finished version of 1919 with his edited copy of Fenollosa’s 1906 manuscript. As it stands, there are changes to the former that do not appear in the latter. Further, they could have offered an explanation of why they chose to print particular lectures from the Fenollosa collections at Harvard and Yale, and not others. Perhaps the reason simply has to do with legibility. Fenollosa’s notes are horribly difficult to read. Yet at the same time, hisseveral lectures on “Chinese Landscape Poetry” from the Beinecke library, for example, would have diluted the sense of the East-Westfusion upon which an emphasis of the edition depends, and so one wonders how many of the other letters and notes in the Harvard and Yale collections would have further done so.

What is more, the editors seem to have acquiesced to the general scholarly belief that after Bernard Karlgren’s assertion in 1923 of the primacy of phonetic over semantic compounds in Chinese writing, Fenollosa and Pound’s enduring belief in an ideogrammic reading became understood as fully eccentric.Yet to be fair, arguments can and have been made limiting the degree of eccentricity such a reading should bear. Henry Rosemont, for example, notes that of the 45,000 phonograms which comprise ninety-five percent of the entries in an unabridged Chinese dictionary, many are also meaning indicative, and derive from the pictorial quality of the Chinese language.

If an ancient scribe wanted to make the new word, /wu,/ meaning, “to lie,” for example, he would begin ideogrammic construction with the radical pictograph /yen/ denoting speech, then add from the generic “man” lexical items, /wu/, the one meaning “magician,” for the phonetic element. Because “magicians were usually considered fakes in ancient China,” Rosemont writes, the word /wu/ meaning “to lie,” would be represented in written form as “the words of a magician,” yet be classified among the phonograms and not the ideograms. So the argument over the validity of a pictorial reading of ideograms continues.

But such quibbles aside, there can be little argument as to the quality of Saussy, Stalling, and Klein’s new critical edition. Its learnedrichness, the span of its discovery, even the clean visual beauty of its type and page layout would make Fenollosa and Pound proud, and will certainly compel scholars to further ruminations over the Fenollosa legacy. For the next generation of Ferlinghettis to gain a renewed sense of their muse, however, the City Lightsedition of the text, unencumbered by scholarly acumen and apparatus, probably still has a separate audience, and its own job to do.

Notes

E-mail interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, through his aid, Garret Staples, 13 January 2009, following a visit to City Lights Books during the MLA Convention in December, 2008.

Henry Rosemont, “On Representing Abstraction in Archaic Chinese.” Philosophy East and West: A Quarterly of Asian and Comparative Thought (1974): 78. There are more recent examples, but Rosemont was the one who first introduced me to the world of China while I was an undergraduate at St Mary’s College of Maryland, so he gets the illustrative note.