No.2 March 1999
The Chinese written character and the ideogrammic
method
From the time when Jesuit brought back the fruit of Sinological studies,
Westerners began to know much about Chinese characters. According to a
prominent work on Ezra Pound by Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , at
the beginning of the 17th century, Francis Bacon was attracted by Chinese
characters and noticed Easterner's way of communication between different
languages using the ideographic characters. When it came to the middle
of the century, savants including Newton and Leibniz thought of inventing
new language comprehensible everywhere, modeling after Chinese characters.
(1)
Ernest Fenollosa
who visited Japan at the end of the 19th century was given lectures on
Chinese Poetry by Kainan Mori and reflected on Chinese characters as a
medium for poetry. His discussion recorded in his notebook is composed
of several points. In the passage where he noticed the hieroglyphic nature
of Chinese characters, he introduced a sentence composed of three Chinese
characters, that is " Man sees horse"(2, photo). Denoting this
sentence as exemplifying, he stated "Chinese notation is based upon
a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature." Then he wrote,
"The group (of characters) holds something of the quality of a continuous
moving picture," implying that each character in this sentence has
a role of a shot in cinematography or a frame in horse-picture. (2)
He considered that Western poetry lacked visual element and painting or
photography dropped time element. However in Chinese poetry, both time
and visual elements are combined like in cinematography, he thought.
"The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its
concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession", he wrote.
Then he presented Browning's line and wrote, "One superiority of verbal
poetry as an art rest in its getting back to the fundamental reality of
time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements.
It speaks at once with vividness of painting and with the mobility of sounds."(3)
The Fenolossa's notebook, with the other perhaps fifteen notebooks, was
brought in hands of Ezra Pound by Fenolossa's widow, Mary Fenolossa, in
1913 and strongly influenced Pound's poetry. Pound edited and published
this notebook first in The Little Review in 1919, and later in book
forms. In the foreword attached to it, he wrote, Fenolossa was "already
led into many modes of thought since fruitful in 'new' Western painting
and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known
as such."(4)
At the beginning of 1910s, in paintings, Picasso discovered collage technique
on his way pursuing cubism, and, in poetry, Marinetti who was proposing
the Futurism and Apollinaire in accordance with him were trying visual
presentation of poetry in search of new mode of image presentation. Fenolossa's
discussion on Chinese written character had commonality with such new movements
in Western arts, Pound might be saying.
The pictorial arrangement of letters in Apollinaire's Calligrammes
might have been an attempt to produce in Western poetry visual effect which
Chinese calligraphic poetry has.
Chinese character has pictorial nature and similarity with collage for
it is constituted by combinations of radicals. When they are calligraphically
arranged, they can form more complex collage-like pattern. Different from
that, alphabetical letters are in a view beads-like, and so it is difficult
to form a collage-like pattern by simply threading them, even though each
letter has different color. Apollinaire might have tried to break the limitation
by arranging alphabetical letters pictorially. He initially called his
attempt ideogrammes lyriques(5).
Pound, strongly influenced by the Fenollosa's discussion, went beyond visual
arrangement of letters and discovered literary technique that produce images
by collage of language. He called the technique ideogrammic method.
In his The
Cantos (6, photo), he dispersed Chinese characters on the pages. He
seems to have intended to form collage pattern with visual arrangement
of letters and with juxtapositions of Chinese characters and alphabetical
letters.
He also used the technique that arranges stanzas collage-like in The
Cantos. This technique was very effective in expressing modern sentiment.
In general, so-called good composition has a linear structure without any
contradiction or disconnection. Like a thread well weaved, sounds and words
are weaved with time, and meanings and images are formed.
However such composition is easily formed only when we express our already-
patterned thoughts. When we intend to express our state of mind realistically,
to compose well organized description is difficult. For thinking and consciousness
normally takes discursive patterns like collage.
If we would say it differently, well organized composition is formed only
when we can arrange our thinking according to already-made rhetoric and
cannot be formed when we try to express our thinking and consciousness
free from ready-made rhetoric. Here the significance of collage technique
in modern literary expression is.
Collage might have been a called-for technique in literature. It made literature
contemporaneous with the exploration by Freud and Jung into human consciousness.
Pound, opposing Aristotelian "monolinear syllogistic arrangement"(7),
used his ideogrammic method not only in The Cantos, but also in
his essays. ABC of Economics and Jefferson and/or Mussolini
were written by this method. These works are often viewed as "discursive."
Literature cited
1) Kenner, Hugh: The Pound Era, University of California Press,
1971. p.223-224.
2) Fenollosa, Ernest (ed. by Pound, Ezra): The Chinese Written Character
as a Medium for Poetry, City Lights Books, 1968. p.8-9. Consulted to
the translational work by Tomiichi Takada, Tokyo Bijutu, 1982.
3)ibid.
4)ibid.
5) Albright, Daniel : Early Cantos I-XLI, in Nadel, Ira B. (ed), The
Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. p.61.
6) Pound, Ezra : The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New directions, 1989.
7)ibid : Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Liveright, 1970.
p.28.
Copyright (C)1999 Hideo Nogami
