Hallucination and Coherence

After finishing and considering his reading of Huang Yunte's recently published translation of The Pisan Cantos into Chinese, Yang Lian commented that, for him, Ezra Pound's poetic project seemed to have been realized—he goes so far as to say that it is “completed” (wancheng)—in the language of the translation, that is, in Chinese.¹ Clearly, this is a claim that cannot be understood in any literal sense. It must be placed in some context, and Yang Lian duly provides a good deal. The claim emerges, at least in part, from ideas that had already become crucial to Yang Lian's own poetic projects, from his engagements with contemporary Chinese poetics that have been influenced by Pound and anticipated in his work and that arguably share a number of concerns with The Cantos. However, there is also a nonexclusive possibility that Yang Lian's stated view is the product of a hallucinated vision of Pound's poem, one that is inescapably modulated by the position—in another language and culture—from which Yang Lian reads. One thing is certain: since we are speaking of poem and translation, any sense of completion the translation provides must be at least transliteral, rather than literal per se.² In what follows, I deal briefly with some of the ways Jacques Derrida has made suggestively similar readings of both Pound's work and the verbal culture of China, and some of the related ways Pound has read that same verbal culture. Nonetheless, I would be content if nagging questions concerning Yang Lian's reading of The Pisan Cantos (in Chinese) are borne in mind. We will return to them.

Where else to start but with the well-known passage from Of Grammatology:

The necessary decentering cannot be a philosophic or scientific act as such, since it is a question of dislocating, through access to another system linking speech and writing, the founding categories of language and the grammar of the epistémè…. It was normal that the breakthrough was more secure and more penetrating on the side of literature and poetic writing: normal also that it, like Nietzsche, at first destroyed and caused to vacillate the transcendental authority and dominant category of the epistémè: being. This is the meaning of the work of Fenollosa whose influence upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. This fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all its historical significance.³

Just as Yang Lian made a claim for the virtues of his own verbal culture, Derrida here makes a claim for the historical (catastrophic, epistemic) significance of Pound's poetics in relation to crucial developments and fundamental reconsiderations within the philosophical and critical thought of our era, let alone its literary history. It is an important claim and, in my own and the view of many others, both sustainable and generative, proven—in practice if not “conclusively” in theory—by the multifaceted poetics that have derived from Pound's work, post-Cathay, and from The Cantos in particular.⁴

However, this claim is also made in a context, and there are a number of serious difficulties embedded within it. Our first task is to expose and cut away those difficulties that give rise to confusion rather than insight. The claim is set against the background of a transcultural engagement, mediated, in the first instance, by Ernest Fenollosa, and it comes toward the (provisional) close of a discussion of grammatology partly in terms of European (mis)conceptions of the Chinese system of writing. Derrida correctly notes—referring to G. W. Leibniz, but with a subsequently elaborated broader applicability—that “the concept of Chinese writing … functioned as a sort of European hallucination…. And the hallucination translated less an ignorance than a misunderstanding. It was not disturbed...