(Re)inventing China.
From Eliot Weinberger's essay 'Inventing China', in Oranges & Peanuts for Sale. (Bolding is mine.)
[Ernest] Fenollosa described how Chinese characters were "ideograms" composed of pictographic elements that combined to form a new word or concept. Thus the sun rising in the branches of a tree became "east." [東 = 日 + 木] (In face, this is true of only a small fraction of Chinese characters, which are largely phonetic, but the mistake was fruitful.) More than a still life of elements placed side by side, a word and its meaning were generated by the dynamic relations among the elements. Moreover, Chinese made no distinction between noun, verb, and adjective (again, only partially true), which meant that every ideogram was a node of energy - thing and action and its description - a configuration of elements that, in turn, became an element, without Western rhetorical glue, in the succession of characters in a line of poetry. Fenollosa saw this as a "moving picture" (as did, completely independently, Sergei Eisenstein, whose studies of Chinese led to his theory of montage and his 1929 essay, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideograph"). [Ezra] Pound saw it as a simultaneity. Here was modernism - Cubism, collage and assemblage. Apollinaire's "Zone" - recapitulated in every word of an ancient language. And here was something deeper: According to Fenollosa's Emersonian transcendentalist outlook, Chinese was "a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature" itself, which knows no pure verbs or nouns, things or actions in isolation, where everything is in active relation. (Henri Michaux would write: "Like nature, the Chinese language does not draw any conclusions of its own, but lets itself be read.")
[...]
In the Imagist aesthetic, which has dominated American poetry for the last ninety years, Chinese was perhaps the greatest example of direct presentation without generalizing comment, of "no ideas except in things." Poets as dissimilar as Charles Reznikoff and Stanley Kunitz, to take one example, each publicly cited the Sung Dynasty critic, Wei T'ai (from one epigraph to A. C. Graham's Poems of the Late T'ang): "Poetry should present the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling."
~
A quotation from critic Kenneth Cox in a different Weinberger essay, "Kenneth Cox".
Hardly a page of [Allen] Upward passes without some such observation immediately acceptable yet in context so illuminating, the reader is brought up short. The constrant recurrence of the feature in passages dealing with matter of great difficulty creates an almost continuous sense of intellectual elation hard to match in modern English. It is further enhanced by a device cultivated in ancient China and found in a few European writers of superior intelligence like Machiavelli Montesquieu and Lichtenberg. These, having made some remark briefly clearly and distinctly formulated, do not stay to amplify but leave the reader to draw from it what conclusions he can at his own peril.
~
I've been reading Chinese poetry in translation and Western commentary about Chinese poetry for so many years, at least since 2000, that it's hard to work out whether I've unconsciously been influenced by these ideas ("direct presentation without generalizing comment"), or whether reading about them I simply found written expression of something that I had been trying (and still try) to do in my prose writing all along. (Which presents a problem when I attempt to write longer pieces. Plot? What plot?)
Oranges & Peanuts for Sale is reviewed in Jacket Magazine.
[Ernest] Fenollosa described how Chinese characters were "ideograms" composed of pictographic elements that combined to form a new word or concept. Thus the sun rising in the branches of a tree became "east." [東 = 日 + 木] (In face, this is true of only a small fraction of Chinese characters, which are largely phonetic, but the mistake was fruitful.) More than a still life of elements placed side by side, a word and its meaning were generated by the dynamic relations among the elements. Moreover, Chinese made no distinction between noun, verb, and adjective (again, only partially true), which meant that every ideogram was a node of energy - thing and action and its description - a configuration of elements that, in turn, became an element, without Western rhetorical glue, in the succession of characters in a line of poetry. Fenollosa saw this as a "moving picture" (as did, completely independently, Sergei Eisenstein, whose studies of Chinese led to his theory of montage and his 1929 essay, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideograph"). [Ezra] Pound saw it as a simultaneity. Here was modernism - Cubism, collage and assemblage. Apollinaire's "Zone" - recapitulated in every word of an ancient language. And here was something deeper: According to Fenollosa's Emersonian transcendentalist outlook, Chinese was "a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature" itself, which knows no pure verbs or nouns, things or actions in isolation, where everything is in active relation. (Henri Michaux would write: "Like nature, the Chinese language does not draw any conclusions of its own, but lets itself be read.")
[...]
In the Imagist aesthetic, which has dominated American poetry for the last ninety years, Chinese was perhaps the greatest example of direct presentation without generalizing comment, of "no ideas except in things." Poets as dissimilar as Charles Reznikoff and Stanley Kunitz, to take one example, each publicly cited the Sung Dynasty critic, Wei T'ai (from one epigraph to A. C. Graham's Poems of the Late T'ang): "Poetry should present the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling."
~
A quotation from critic Kenneth Cox in a different Weinberger essay, "Kenneth Cox".
Hardly a page of [Allen] Upward passes without some such observation immediately acceptable yet in context so illuminating, the reader is brought up short. The constrant recurrence of the feature in passages dealing with matter of great difficulty creates an almost continuous sense of intellectual elation hard to match in modern English. It is further enhanced by a device cultivated in ancient China and found in a few European writers of superior intelligence like Machiavelli Montesquieu and Lichtenberg. These, having made some remark briefly clearly and distinctly formulated, do not stay to amplify but leave the reader to draw from it what conclusions he can at his own peril.
~
I've been reading Chinese poetry in translation and Western commentary about Chinese poetry for so many years, at least since 2000, that it's hard to work out whether I've unconsciously been influenced by these ideas ("direct presentation without generalizing comment"), or whether reading about them I simply found written expression of something that I had been trying (and still try) to do in my prose writing all along. (Which presents a problem when I attempt to write longer pieces. Plot? What plot?)
Oranges & Peanuts for Sale is reviewed in Jacket Magazine.