Orientalism And Modernism - The Tale Of The Tribe

When I lived in New Orleans 2003-04 I was browsing a bookshop and stumbled upon the book "Orientalism and modernism" by Zhaoming Qian. The book travelled with me to New York, Chicago and back to the Bay Area and onto the UK, finally sitting on my shelf today, in Amsterdam. Everytime I go back to it I'm rewarded with enriched mental images. 

For any studying the tale of the tribe as outlined by Robert Anton Wilson, "Orientalism and Modernism" is my recommended introduction, getting at central themes such as being/non-being and contextualizing them in multicultural discourse orbiting poetry, the language of the tribe. 

This book, for me, reflects some of the reasons why Wilson included the relatively obscure scholar of far-eastern art and poetry: Ernest Fenollosa, in his dozen or so...historical modernist influencers (Bruno, Vico, Nietzsche, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Korzybski, Fuller, Shannon, McLuhan, Welles)

I'd argue that some techniques employed by early Chinese poets predate the modernist tendencies and explorations of beingness, demonstrable/evidenced in the analysis of ellipsis, juxtaposition...plus symmetry with natural forms. Beautiful stuff. Toward a language of Daoism and quantum mechanics?       

 Good day.

--Steve Fly    

 

Author: Zhaoming Qian 

Subjects

Asian Studies, Literature and Literary Studies > Literary Criticism

Chinese culture held a well-known fascination for modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. What is less known but is made fully clear by Zhaoming Qian is the degree to which oriental culture made these poets the modernists they became. This ambitious and illuminating study shows that Orientalism, no less than French symbolism and Italian culture, is a constitutive element of Modernism.
Consulting rare and unpublished materials, Qian traces Pound’s and Williams’s remarkable dialogues with the great Chinese poets—Qu Yuan, Li Bo, Wang Wei, and Bo Juyi—between 1913 and 1923. His investigation reveals that these exchanges contributed more than topical and thematic ideas to the Americans’ work and suggests that their progressively modernist style is directly linked to a steadily growing contact and affinity for similar Chinese styles. He demonstrates, for example, how such influences as the ethics of pictorial representation, the style of ellipsis, allusion, and juxtaposition, and the Taoist/Zen–Buddhist notion of nonbeing/being made their way into Pound’s pre-Fenollosan Chinese adaptations, Cathay, Lustra, and the Early Cantos, as well as Williams’s Sour Grapes and Spring and All. Developing a new interpretation of important work by Pound and Williams, Orientalism and Modernism fills a significant gap in accounts of American Modernism, which can be seen here for the first time in its truly multicultural character.

The Modernest response to Chinese Art

The Modernist Response to Chinese Art

Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends by Zhaoming Qian

Ernest Fenollosa 2014 and TTOTT

"Ezra Pound was no starnger to Oriental art when he met Mary McNeil Fenollosa, the widow of the American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), in London in late September 1913."--Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism (1994)  pg. 9. 

Fenollosa 2014 and TTOTT 

 by Steve Fly

"Fenollosa [1853-1908], wrote an essay on
"The Chinese WrittenCharacter as a Medium for Poetry" which vastly influenced
Ezra Pound and, through Pound, modern poetry generally;
said essay also anticipates some formulations of General Semantics
and NeuroLinguistic Programming [NLP], and foreshadows
modern critiques of "linear" and "alphabetical" thinking. --Robert Anton Wilson, Recorsi 2005.

Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) found a place in the chain of human innovation, and the lineage of modernism as defined by Dr Robert Anton Wilson in his unfinished project called 'the tale of the tribe'. Please read some of my others posts trying to get at TTOTT and what it all means to me.

When compared with other characters from TTOTT Ernest Fenollosa seems a rather strange addition at first glance, hardly any of the Wilson readers i know hold Fenollosa to be as influential in defining TTOTT as say, Pound, Joyce or McLuhan. At the same time Fenollosa is rarely noted as an influence on RAW, in any writings i have found, which says something about the focus on RAWs subject matter, opposed to his hologramic prose style, or his specially hand-crafted Robert Anton Wilson language that weaves together signs, symbols, equations and primary experiences into the magical texts he left behind for us to meditate upon.

RAWs lifelong reading and re-reading the works of Ezra Pound seem to me to be where he might have first come across Fenollosa, and probably through his work: The Chinese Written Character As A Medium for Poetry, which has a famous introduction by Ez. I would like to note here that RAW once led an online class (2004) at the virtual Maybe Logic Academy, called The Ideogrammic Method and set the above text by Fenollosa as course work, together with sections from Pound's ABC of Reading.

Here we are in 2014, how and why on earth would some obscure American scholar of Japanese Art and Poetry who has been dead 105 years be important to any of us today? To attempt a quick answer to that question would be foolish, and as only fools rush in I'll get my feet wet and suppose that Fenollosa is important because he was instrumental in the development of modernism, more precisely his works got to Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats and by osmosis the whole world or global village, introducing for the first time around 1913/14 highly developed poetry, history and culture from the Orient, in particular Japan and China.

This first contact with the best parts of Oriental poetry, plays, and paintings fused a new level of coherence within the small group of western poets gathered in London. A new aesthetic emerged, and can be traced through poetry, sculpture, painting, clothing design, throughout the 20's, into the 30's and then splintered and somewhat shit upon during WWII.

After these great global horrors, fewer people in the west wished to pay much fair and unbiased attention to some ancient Japanese poets and Chinese Buddhist philosophers. However the tale goes on, and of course we emerge out of the arts world and the literary impact of the oriental traditions to the economic and political-military-industrial impact on the global stage.

"It eplores the influences such as ethics of pictorial representation, the syle of ellipses, allusion, and juxtaposition, and the Taoist/Chan-Buddhist (Zen-Buddhist) notion of nonbeing/being (formlessness/form) in Pound's pre-Fenollosan Chinese adaptions (1914), Cathay (1915), Lustra (1916), and Early Cantos (1915-19), and in Williams' Sour Grapes (1921) and Spring and All (1923).--Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism (1994)  pg. 9.

China, in 2014, still remains occluded to most westerners. I mean to say, we, or most people i know and communicate with are as like the public of 1909, without any inkling as to what the Chinese language and culture is about. Myself included. Yet, what fascinates me about Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound and Robert Anton Wilson is the synchrony in the general message "Taoist/Chan-Buddhist (Zen-Buddhist) notion of nonbeing/being (formlessness/form)"

In 1913 we have a special intersection point, from the point of view of the development of peaceful communication between peoples and cultures (The Orient and the Western lands), in the passing over of Fenollosa's manuscript to Ezra Pound, who then published it and promoted it to the hilt. Perhaps this point in history exactly 100 years ago should be celebrated and so investigated due to the gravity of the situation from the perspective of modern poetry and its proponents and their impact and precursive-innovations on such fields as Neuro Linguistic Programming, computer programming, pluralistic non-linear conceptual, and, non-conceptual models of history.

There seems to me traces of Buddhist/Taoist wisdom contained within the Chinese characters themselves, on some level, when you think of caligraphy and the ancient ceremonial approaches to writing and painting. To generally empty the mind of clutter and get with the flow, and go.  

Here, i think that RAW may have been hinting at another way forward, or around the problems presented by alphabet cultures, and the general subject-predicate orientation that often skews the sensation of being/nonbeing, or tuning in/tuning out which has much more in common with ancient Chinese (Chan-Buddhist) wisdom, than our western Aristotelian history of alphabet.

Internet and HTML present an interesting case where alpha/numeric characters can be combined and reused to create fantastic parallel processing powers. Yet, most human western brains are still wired with an Aristotelian system, hundreds of years old, totally at odds with the nature of the things we pertain to know, speak of, write about etc.

Together with the principles of lets say, Count Alfred Korzybski,  a total revolution in the human mind is possible, and therefore a total assault on the culture. A transformation in the perception of language, can transform the entire cosmos, to paraphrase B.J Whorf. Consider the Hubble telescope, for example, and how it has changed our perceptions of the cosmos, but with images of a higher resolution.

The Fenollosa/Korzybski version of the Hubble telescope would be turned in on the viewer, looking deep into inner space--your mind--where the formation of language clusters and tiny universes dance and morph and often burst out into communications. These outbursts are limited by whatever singular forms are invoked from the vast limitless region of mind, by the word-things that are what we all know and what we love, the familiar day to day language of waking life that we share.

Yet too often, outbursts without doubt or the suspension of judgement, eruptions full of the continuous lyric of 'I', or of 'being'. The ego-beak or bigger rhino tusk, trampling through the human universe, blinkered to the infinite flux of being all around in 360 degrees, here, in the decentralized universe promoted by Girodano Bruno in 1584 where you sit.

Somewhere in the Korzybski matrix of general semantics can be found A WAY to better sanity. The way to better sanity involves attention to language, you are what you think. And by extension, in a McLuhaneque way, you are what you watch, what you listen to, what you type. In a hyper-connected world you are what you tune into, like the old Zen-Buddhist poets thought on occasion. Attention to mind, body, speech, or the cleansing of the doors of perception. Like RAW often hinted at: "repeat often, if you want to be a writer, do it every day, if you want to become miserable watch the news everyday, if you want to become a concert pianist, do it every day."

The global Internet opens the doors for the good and the bad to enter you and become one with you, like some kind of intergalactic body-snatcher. Therefore, to go back and trace the history of those wise people in the west who warned us, but and also provided useful tools, methods, principles, tricks, hacks, helpful feedback on the issues at hand, solutions, or general paths to where some solutions may lie, is an important journey in 2014, i think.

Buckminster Fuller also promoted the modification of the language used to describe new and future technology, based on the fact that any and all innovation starts in the human mind: the matrix of Korzybski, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Girodano Bruno, Claude Shannon, Bucky, and RAW...all characters in the tale of the tribe. All these characters from TTOTT can show us the way towards changing our own minds and transforming the world around us, as we work to practically transform that perceived world to the benefit of others.

Here lie dormant tools for the mind to navigate around many challenges faced by humanity in 2014, use them. Ernest Fenollosa helps to define the kind of Orientalism wisdom RAW (who had a pen name Mark Chan) liked to promote and found most interesting to his on going study of language, etymology, and how to get beyond language.

This synergy between Fenollosa and RAW also helps to pin point the area of most interest to RAW concerning Ezra Pound, which can be best be encapsulated by the Ideogrammic Method. At this point i might mention that another innovation, with a modernist heritage, and that seems in resonance with the Taoist/Buddhist concept of being/nonbeing can be found in Joyce's masterwork Finnegans Wake, which stretches and contorts alphabetical languages to near breaking point, forcing the familiar signs and symbols to behave upon a completely different axis of meaning, turned upside down and inside out 'all laotsey taotsey' as Joyce might say.

FW includes a rather large portion of foreign languages including Chinese, Japanese and Gaelic/Irish, translated and reconnected through his super condensed hologrammic prose. Much like ideogrammic method of Pound, the hologrammic prose of Joyce condenses meaning and fires off branches of context in all directions through spacetime. A relativistic prose. A kind of design science innovation, a new poetic shorthand, a blast of synaesthesia. A stylized alphabetical sculpture, at least, to stand proud next to a picture, a painting, a photograph, a movie projection, overshadowing the world of written words?

How can the word, as we now know it--stand up--to the new media of a visually dominated world? Well, Joyce had his own weird ways, possibly having something to do with his interest in synchronicity and transference of the sensation of epiphany, more on that another time. I think that living your life with integrity and honesty, and living in resonance, sympathetically with the symbol systems and languages around you can help a lot. You can also simply feel yourself as the center of all things, the master who makes the grass green, and if you like ask yourself what role these TTOTT characters have had in the rapid trajectory of culture we all now find ourselves inter-twinned with through our digital being/nonbeing

--Steve fly
Amsterdam
1/1/14

My ETTT post linking to an essay on Ernest Fenollosa that includes many TTOTT luminaries. A must read for a deep academic tour of WHY Fenollosa matters in 2014.

"The pictographic and ideographic nature of Chinese characters conduces to thinking in images, which, in turn, renders Chinese thinking, among other things: 1. analogical 2. nonlinear 3. concrete 4. holistic 5. intuitive 6. in harmony with nature.--http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss3/1_3art7.htm

1922 year 1 of MODERNISM (Book review)

A new age dawned on October 30 1921, said Ezra Pound, who claimed that the Christian Era ended on the day that James Joyce finished the final paragraph of Ulysses. Three months later Joyce’s book was published on the palindromic date of 2/2/22 – his 40th birthday --http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/historybookreviews/9712690/Constellation-of-Genius-by-Kevin-Jackson-review.html

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World – review

"The moon is frequently associated in the poem with creativity, while the sun is more often found in relation to the sphere of political and social activity, although there is frequent overlap between the two. From the Rock Drill sequence on, the poem's effort is to merge these two aspects of light into a unified whole.--Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos

This article from the Guardian gives us some context for Pound's impact, and gives us some insight into the creative explosion in the arts just before the first world war turned that creativity on its head. Some accents added and some removed--steve fly.

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World – review

Laura Cumming
The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011.

Tate Britain

‘A pile-driving vision of the future’: The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein, 1913-1915. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/ Rex Features
Rock Drill ought to be his name, not just the title of this long-lost work (this is a reconstruction of the dismantled original). He has terrible force of personality. And he is the most devastating creation in this show by some way, a sculpture from 1913 that seems to summarise all that vorticism stood for with its driving ambition for machine-age dynamism and shattering new forms. The Rock Drill ought to be the ideal host, the perfect symbol for both the movement and the show. Except that Epstein was never a paid-up vorticist.
In the long march through modernism, vorticism is the quickest of steps. It flares up in 1914, peaks briefly in 1915 and sputters out towards the end of the first world war. There are only two shows. There are only two issues of its in-house journal, Blast. There may be only one full-time vorticist. "Vorticism," declared Wyndham Lewis in the 1950s, "was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period." The assertion may have infuriated the surviving members of the group, but it is not without its merit when you consider the diversity of their gifts, from the painter David Bomberg to the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, compared to Lewis's single-mindedness as ringleader, recruiting sergeant, megaphone, exemplar and theorist of England's only homegrown avant-garde movement. Lewis belongs to the first generation of Europe's non-representational artists. His drawings are incisive, satirical, on the edge of abstraction. His paintings from this phase – angular, syncopated, explosive – are even better, which is some claim, given that scarcely any survive. In the 1912 illustrations for Timon of Athens, he begins to abandon depth for a flat pageant of forms that jostle like the elements of some unsolved puzzle. By 1915, in his enormous painting The Crowd, he shows quasi-cubist figures haplessly scattered in a system of grids that seems to prefigure the pinball machine. Workshop (1914-15) is a marvellous concatenation of geometric planes, in coruscating pinks and hot mustards, that almost resolve into windows, ladders, stacks and shelves, by day and yet also, as it seems, by night. It turns architecture inside out. And seeing it in Tate Britain's survey, surrounded by fading issues of Blast, old catalogues and invitations, typed manifestos and handwritten declarations of solidarity or hatred – period pieces of English art history from 100 years ago – it suddenly looks more modern than ever. With its graphic zip and register, Workshop conjures pop art half a century in advance. There are other masterpieces in this show, but not many. Tate Britain has David Bomberg's terrific painting The Mud Bath, with its interplay of bent, reclining and zigzagging forms packed into a scarlet tank. It has Gaudier-Brzeska's Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, biting its mucklestone lip. From the front, it is Pound to a stylised T (was ever a poet more portrayed?) from his goatee to his bouffant quiff. From the rear, it resembles a circumcised phallus. "Make it virile," was Pound's bombastic command; contemporary critics found it merely pornographic. Nobody visiting this show could fail to spot the influence of abroad in almost every work. The Dancers, Les Demoiselles: Wyndham Lewis's chorus line wends its way directly out of Picasso. Roger Fry had mounted his celebrated exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, back in 1910, the same year Marinetti delivered his futurist lectures in London. The trick with this show is to try and remain indifferent to the obvious strains of cubism and futurism that appear wherever you look. It is not hard, for instance, to deduce local figurative forms in all this accordion-pleated abstraction – piano keys and nightclubs, people and performers, London alleys and even the back-to-back terraces of northern mining towns. Lewis saw that cubism, for instance, could be more than a highly advanced visual language. It could be made to speak of life itself, with all thronging motion, humanity, incident. One of the strongest works here is his wonderfully acute Architect With Green Tie (1909), which skewers the self-importance of a particular man while sending up the profession's characteristic fondness for that calculated spot of colour. The work isn't abstract at all, in fact; it's one of Lewis's best caricatures. But it also predates vorticism, exposing an unusual dilemma for the curators of this show, which originated in North Carolina. Vorticism is such a brief movement and so little of the art survives (a huge tranche of it, belonging to the US collector John Quinn, vanished long ago) that it is quite a feat to assemble anything representative. The exhibition attempts to counter the problem by including a good many fellow-travellers, recreating both of the original vorticist shows and displaying the issues of Blast, with its upper-case insults, wonderful woodcuts and wild demagoguery, along with testaments of war, imaginary and real. Here is the row between Lewis and Fry over the Daily Mail's Ideal Home Exhibition, of all things, played out in aggressive letters. Here are the missives from the Western Front, including Gaudier-Brzeska's final postcard before he died in the trenches. He was 23. By the time you get to the end of this vigorous yet melancholy exhibition, vorticism has dwindled into a graphic style. Anyone can imitate it by now and they do. There are still some startling works to come: Edward Wadsworth's fantastically concise woodcuts are among the best things here. Look at his Newcastle, as neatly condensed a sonnet to industry, ironwork, bridge span and community as you could find, all stitched together with saw-tooth zips: English printmaking at its sharpest. But even if its members had not lost their lives, the first world war had to kill off this machine-loving movement. Alas, because this show is so strictly vorticist, you do not see how the best of the artists responded, what Lewis made of the trenches in his war paintings, how he mocked his own brutal machismo, his own vicious energy, in the savage self-portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro. But what you do see is what became of Epstein's The Rock Drill, once again an accidental symbol of the group. Legs gone, drill removed, hands lopped off, Epstein turned the torso into an amputee, vulnerable, disarmed, a victim of wartime violence. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/19/vorticists-tate-britain-review