Fenollosa

This essay bothered me. I feel like he’s being ridiculously ethnocentric (the curse of the era) and I can’t tell whether he’s giving the Chinese culture the respect it deserves or whether he’s just another Orientalist. In the introduction, there’s that bit about how he “restored, or greatly helped to restore, a respect for the native art.” Like the Japanese couldn’t do that themselves! I’m not sure what about it bothers me so much. Like maybe I had a class where someone told me that statements like that (like those throughout the text) are superflawed and racist(ish) but I don’t remember their argument why. The college experience does that.

And now to the text.

“Hey, the Orientals rock, let’s steal all their ideas and then maybe we can kick their butts!”

Fenollosa argues that ideograms are inherently better suited to poetry because they look more like what they’re supposed to be. Is visual art superior to word-only poetry? It’s not only because characters look like what they represent, but because the etymology is visible. It is in English, too, and poets have all kinds of fun with it—at least, I do. Inspire = to (be) breath(ed) in(to). English just requires a little more abstract thought, because of the lack of visual representation. I’ve looked at Japanese characters and had no idea what they were supposed to represent—-a stylized tree looks like any number of things!—-until someone explained it to me (as Fenollosa explains “sun rises (in the) east”). The image works more on a mnemonic level than a literal one.

Once again, I love the idea of syntax mirroring perception (man---sees---horse) but growl at his limiting perception to only the one “right” order. Horse---man---sees works too (and is more appropriate to Japanese...not all languages are SOV!).

Fenollosa says later that Nature has no grammar...yet only one order of perception is “right.” Hmm.

And as far as talking about how the Chinese language hasn’t changed like ours has (at least visually)—-that is LIES. The brushstrokes change, bits get left out, essentialized, embellished...the only reason Chinese hasn’t changed its handwriting quite as fast as we have is because they’ve stayed all one nation (more or less) and regulated it more strictly, as well as the whole worldview where change is rarely good (and for us it’s “progress”).

I like Fenollosa’s dig at previous discussers of Chinese poetry—-it’s not their fault, they weren’t POETS! I feel sorry for any of them that actually were. =P

Transitive verbs are more specific, active, yes, perhaps; but sometimes they’re just not what one wants. “Is” can be powerful, just look at the surrealists.

Fenollosa did, however, give me an idea for a series of poems converting Japanese poems into their radicals (the building-blocks of characters) and translating them literally and seeing what happens, maybe even placing them on the page in their relative locations. I think it might turn out really ugly, though.