The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition

Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination

1 1 The place of Ernest Francisco Fenollosa’s essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” as a major document of twentieth-century American poetry and poetics is secure—if only that is the right place to put it. Donald Davie considered it “perhaps the only English document of our time fit to rank with Sidney’s Apologie, and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Shelley’s Defence.”1 AndCharlesOlson:“thedamnedbestpieceonlanguagesincewhen.”2 Intheeyes of Ezra Pound, its first editor, it was “a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics” and “the first definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism.”3 Some twenty-five years after first encountering the manuscript, Pound’s advice to young poets was still: “For Ars Poetica, gorrdamit, get my last edtn of Fenollosa’s ‘Chinese Written Character.’ Vide my introduction.”4 Pound’s claims for the essay have not gone unchallenged. The Yale linguist George A. Kennedy called it “a mass of confusion” based on a “complete misunderstanding ” of the Chinese language.5 Kennedy’s verdict has held among those who take China and Japan as their field of study: for them, the “ideogrammic method” is just a fantasy, harmless if irritatingly persistent. But the essay’s lasting appeal as a manifesto of the new poetics of the twentieth century has scarcely been affected by the skepticism of scholars and philologists, a disavowal for which Pound characteristically blamed “the general nullity and incompetence of Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination H a u n S a u s s y The critic who doesn’t make a personal statement . . . is merely an unreliable critic. . . . KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That’s what the word means. —Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading Cerno, to separate, sift (rare). . . . To separate, distinguish by the senses, mostly by the eyes, i.e., to perceive, to discern . . . to perceive, comprehend, understand . . . to decide something that is contested or doubtful . . . to decide by contending or fighting. . . . Crimen, n. contr. for cernimen, from cerno . . . A judgment, charge, accusation, reproach. —New Latin Dictionary 2 Haun Saussy organized intellectual life in America, England, their universities in general and their learned publications at large.”6 Andrew Welsh observes: “When the aim of the essay is misunderstood it can appear to be a fanciful and incompetent work on Chinese linguistics. When the aim of the essay is understood it can still generate suspicion or worse in literary critics.”7 Like a touchstone or melting-point, the essay separates its readers into two groups, those who care about poetry and those who care about the Chinese written character.8 It is easy to forget that the argument of the essay was that the two are at root one. Does it matter for poets and critics that Fenollosa’s sinology fails to persuade specialists? Does it matter for scholars of Asian languages and literatures that Fenollosa’s essay accounts for a large part of the fascination of twentieth-century English-language poets for classical China and Japan? The guiding hypothesis of the present critical edition is that it should matter, and that the institution of “two cultures” that can so easily ignore each other weakens both literature and scholarship. But when one and the same object passes for both “scientific method” and “confusion,” it is not enough simply to note the disagreement; we must account for it somehow, by supplying the purposes that direct the praise and the blame. And these are not simply the divergent aims of the poet and the linguist. “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” has long been read as if Ezra Pound, not Ernest Fenollosa, were its author. By restoring Fenollosa’s text and attempting to reconstruct his purposes, we hope to anchor it yet more firmly in the intercultural dialogue of which Pound is a part—a prominent part, but only a part. 2 To “place” the essay rightly, it will be necessary to retrace its publication and reception history, then double back to its compositional history before reassessing it in a larger context of aims and awarenesses. “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” was part of a bundle of manuscripts on Chinese and Japanese language, literature, art, and thought that their author’s widow, Mary McNeil Fenollosa, bestowed on a young American poet living in London, Ezra Pound. As Pound recalled in 1958: After meeting Mrs Fenollosa at Sarojini Naidu’s in or about 19[13] she read some...