Orientalism, modernism, and the American poem (review)

In Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem Robert Kern explores American and European approaches to Chinese language and literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they have influenced American poetry and poetics. Kern shows that the work of twentieth-century poets such as Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder is shaped by the confluence of, on the one hand, the Emersonian tradition of the search for the “language of nature” and, on the other, an inaccurate but recurrent and productive understanding of Chinese as a language that approximates this ideal. The first half of the book traces both of these tendencies in nineteenth-century literature and philology. Emerson, as one would expect, looms large in the historical analysis, but Kern also gives an extremely detailed account of the rejection of Chinese as an inferior language in German philology and its revaluation in the work of the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen and the American orientalist Ernest Fenollosa. The last two chapters, which make up the second half of the book, focus on the reworking of these traditions in twentieth-century American poetry. Pound’s reception of Fenollosa and his “invention” of Chinese poetry in English, most notably in Cathay, not only mark a turning point in the development of a modernist aesthetic in poetry but also significantly influence Snyder’s translations of Han-shan and more generally his “orientalizing” poetic style. At the same time, both Pound and Snyder, in different ways, reengage the Emersonian search for a language as close as possible to the world of objects and of nature: Snyder’s No Nature, in this view, echoes and positions itself in relation to Emerson’s Nature.

In his thorough analysis of the American tradition, Kern shows how Chinese is again and again associated with the ideal of a pure and concrete language that avoids Western abstractness and puts the poet in direct contact with the world of things, allowing him or her privileged access to the language of nature. Such judgments are not, of course, derived from any detailed linguistic analysis of Chinese but rely primarily on the picturelike appearance of Chinese characters. Kern readily admits that this kind of analysis has only the most tenuous relationship to Chinese itself, especially for a writer such as Pound, who had no firsthand knowledge of it. The value of Pound’s reasoning about Chinese lies not in its philological accuracy but in the way in which Chinese becomes a device that allows him to envision and practice an innovative poetics that radically breaks with its Victorian predecessors and shares with Emerson the search for a mode of expression that “overcomes the arbitrariness of ordinary discourse and achieves access to the being of the world” (5). Kern therefore carefully balances his general argument between an ideological critique of Western misreadings of Chinese that, following the parameters of Said’s seminal work Orientalism, shows how real Chinese language and culture have been erased by such cultural constructions, and the analysis of how these misreadings have turned out to be culturally productive in the West: “Pound’s involvement with Chinese poetry represents a certain, probably unavoidable, neglect of its full reality as an independent and exotic cultural production. Although it provokes and enables Pound’s pursuit of modernism, Chinese poetry itself, to just this extent, is displaced as a literary tradition in its own right” (156).

The strength of Kern’s investigation lies less in the originality of his approaches to individual writers—many of them have been studied in depth, and Pound’s “magnificent misreading” of Chinese (Hugh Kenner, quoted on 206) is one of the most frequently discussed paradoxes in East-West literary relations—than in his demonstration of how they have related and responded to each other over nearly two centuries. His patient and nuanced presentation, conveyed with great lucidity in every chapter, would have found an even more congenial theoretical framework in Xiaomei Chen’s theory of “occidentalism,” designed as both a...