SOURCE: "Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan," in Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall, 1984, pp. 211-27.

The main title of this article was originally "Inventing Grammatology." Mr. Burton Hatlen, however, suggested another title: "Misreading the Ideogram." I decided to accept his suggestion partly because I remember the title of Harold Bloom's book A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). There are at least two reasons for associating my article with the deep structures of his book: first, his theory of poetry is Vichian and Emersonian, and second, his "primal scene of instruction" differs markedly from Derrida's "scene of writing," that is, it contains a significant dose of deconstructive Pharmakon for Derrida's grammatology.

Ex litterarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri.

—Andrea Alciati

. . . a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms.

—Roman Jakobson

I

Many years ago T. S. Eliot spoke enthusiastically of Ezra Pound as the "inventor" of Chinese poetry for our time. Eliot had to have in mind the "ideogrammic method" employed, for example, by Pound in The Cantos whose alphabetic architecture is marked by the soaring columns of Chinese ideograms which are read hierarchically, from top to bottom. These columns shine like the glittering rays of the "sunrise" (East) visible in and through the tree's branches and leaves in the early morning. The "origin" (arche) of Pound's "invention" of Chinese poetry and subsequently of his ideogrammic method is traceable directly to the "etymosinology" of Ernest Fenollosa whose literary executor he was. If Pound is the "inventor" of Chinese poetry for our time, then Fenollosa deserves to be called its "arche-inventor."¹

In the double sense of philia and phobia, the ebb and flow of Orientalism is nothing new in the habitus of Western intellectual and practical thought. Indeed, it has been chameleon-like. Early European Catholic missionaries in Japan expressed their unqualified and unrestrained admiration for the Japanese kanji (ideograms) as being superior to Greek and Latin. The degree of difficulty in learning it did not deter or dampen their admiration. The "ontological difference," as it were, between the alphabetic and the ideographic deepened the aura and mystery of those little iconographic pyramids. The newly initiated or neophyte would naturally be enchanted by the "ideogrammic abracadabra" and its "poetic alchemy." This is so despite the judgment of the grammatologist Hegel who, perfectly consonant with his general view of world history, was convinced of the superiority of "abstract" alphabetic writing over "concrete" ideographic writing in the historical development of human linguistic systems. Hegel is worth being noted here because Fenollosa went to Japan to teach philosophy with a favorable disposition for his thought.

Fenollosa's youthful literary environment was the "American Renaissance" whose masters were Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville.² The American hypnotic fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics came from the work of Jean-François Champollion—the Frenchman who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics with the aid of the Rosetta stone in the 1830s. We do not have to stretch our imagination too far to connect Egyptian hieroglyphics with Chinese ideograms. The enthusiasm for one can easily be transferred to the other. In Fenollosa's case, his etymosinology has been related to Emerson's conception of nature, language and poetry which we shall explore later. Fenollosa's fascination with Chinese ideograms is certainly comparable to Emerson's enchantment with Egyptian hierogylphics: they all are the "emblems" of nature beyond whose visual veil there are inscrutable "golden secrets" which are not readily decipherable to ordinary people. Whoever unveils or deciphers the emblems of nature is a "magician" of some sort—like an ancient Egyptian scribe.

In the long cherished tradition of the American fascination with the "mysterious" and "exotic" land of Japan, it is not surprising to see the fantastic success of James Clavell's Shogun on television as well as in classrooms for teaching modern Japanese history. Conversely, Occidentalism has faced the same kind of fate in the Orient—particularly in Japan. The Japanese, I think, are notorious for their Occidentalism (especially in their linguistic Anglophilianism) since the time of the Meiji Restoration in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, during which time Fenollosa spent his most energetic and productive years in organizing Japanese art and propagating its importance to the indigenous population.³ Several years ago, the Japanese journalist Takao Tokuoka reported with humor in the editorial column of the New York Times the inventive word towelket—a shop sign written in Japanese phonetic characters (kana)—which is a combination of the two English words towel and blanket [towelket = towel + (blan)ket]. What born Joyceans the Japanese are! Of course, what I have in mind is Joyce's talent or inventiveness for composing chordal vocabularies in the Ulysses and the Finnegans Wake. The Joycean "decomposition" or musicalization of the "abcedminded" world or the "popeyed world" of the "scribblative" has its structural parallel to Fenollosa's deconstruction or demystification of Chinese ideograms as emblems. Joyceanism or Joyce's unique stylistics stands out for its tremendous proclivities for making visible words chordal and for thinking in chords after the acoustic model of music, that is, for the production of chordal meanings by obliterating (auditory) content and (visual) form: thornghts (thorn + thoughts), rhythmatick (rhythm + mathematics), paupulation (paucity + population), evoluation (evolution + evaluation), cerebration (cerebrum + celebration), etc.⁴ If Fenollosa's etymological deconstruction of Chinese ideograms (kanji) is correct, the composition of towelket is a result of the natural habitus of the Japanese mind—in fact, of the Oriental mind that is accustomed to the vorticism of Chinese ideograms.

From the very outset, it must be said that the importance of Fenollosa's etymosinology cannot be underestimated. It is an archaeology of linguistic terms in the sense of tracing backward. Moreover, etymosinology implies the inseparable connection between the Chinese language and culture in their historical patterns.⁵ Since time immemorial the Chinese have acknowledged the interrelatedness of external reality and the language that describes it. Things of nature become real for men by acquiring names. From the "rectification of names" (cheng ming) emerges the unique conception of language as both performative and intrinsic to our conception of the world and our conduct in it. By defining language as intrinsic to our conception of the world, I mean to stress the idea that language is not merely an object among other objects in the world. For it makes all other objects transparent, that is, an object becomes for man an object by acquiring a name for itself.

II

The main topic of our discussion is Ernest Fenollosa's An Essay on the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry which was posthumously published by Ezra Pound in 1920 in his befittingly titled Instigations.⁶ To be truthful to the carefully phrased title, there are three important issues to be considered: (1) the nature of poetry (Section II), (2) the conception of Chinese ideograms (Section III), and (3) the question of language as a medium of communication (Section IV). The controversial nature of Fenollosa's essay and Pound's use of Chinese ideograms as a medium for his poetry needs no elaboration—especially the pros and cons by sinologists. What is interesting is the fascination with Chinese grammatology of non-sinologists such as Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, who are primarily interested in advancing their own theories of language and literature.

Emerson's influence on Fenollosa's conception of poetry seems undeniable and clearly visible. Emerson's essay "The Poet" (1844) is singularly important for our discussion of Fenollosa. There are two issues we must analyze: (1) the relationship between poetry and language; and (2) words as actions.

1. Poetry and Language. It is not altogether surprising that many poet-critics have come to the conclusion that poetry is the "first language" of humanity and the poet is the "first man." For Fenollosa, poetry and language grew up together. Long before Emerson and Fenollosa, the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who made no distinction between Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese ideograms, propounded the view that not only is poetry inseparable from language but also poetry is the "origin" (arche) of language itself. The following passage from "The Poet," one of the most eloquent passages in the entire corpus of Emerson's writings, echoes the Vichian philosophy of language:

The poets made all the words, and therefore, language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.⁷

For Emerson, language is the very special gift of man. It is the milieu that connects invisible spirit and visible nature: it is the "sign" or "emblem" of nature. In this regard, spirit and material things are inseparably linked. Following Emerson, Fenollosa too comes to the view that Chinese ideograms convert "material images" into "immaterial relations."⁸ In this sense, every ideogram is a metaphor whose function is absolutely indispensable to poetry and poetic imagination. For Emerson, the words that express our intellectual or moral facts are rooted directly in "material appearance":

Right originally means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eye-brow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are, in their turn, words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they continually convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.⁹

What Emerson saw in hieroglyphics is what Fenollosa saw in Chinese ideograms.

2. Words as Actions. According to Emerson, "Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words."¹⁰ By the same token, the poet is one who can articulate the world in terms of "nouns" and "verbs." In this Emersonian tradition, Fenollosa describes ideograms as "vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature."¹¹ Chinese ideograms are the "concrete pictures" of things in nature. As the ideogram is an idea in action, there is no separation between thing and action. Moreover, poetry agrees with science, not with logic since science is something "concrete" whereas logic is something "abstract." Poetry as well as art is concerned not with "the general" and "the abstract" but with "the concrete of nature, not with rows of separate 'particulars,' . . . Poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of words."¹² Poetry brings language close to things. Whereas logic considers thought as "a kind of brickyard" and builds "pyramids of attenuated concept" until it reaches the apex called "being," science gets at the "things" themselves which lie at the base of the conceptual pyramid. "Grammar" is the "logic" of language; however, nature knows no grammar. Like nature, the Chinese language too knows no grammar. If, in Chinese, words are the "concrete pictures" of nature, nouns are "things in motion" and verbs "motion in things."

Moreover, ideograms are performative, that is, they are kinetic. Indeed, Chinese ideography (calligraphy in particular) is a kinetic art: it is the human body in motion.¹³ In very significant measure, Chinese ideography is a choreography of human gestures or, to use the phrase of George Herbert Mead, "a conversation of gestures."¹⁴ However, it is not simply "physiographic" or "pictorial," because to be ideographic the "pictures" of human gestures or things must reach the proper level of signs or symbols: as a sign or symbol, the ideogram must have twofold unity of external "indication" and meaningful "expression." Be that as it may, I am always impressed with the fact that such Chinese ideograms as "anger," "sorrow," and "smile" depict the contours of those facial expressions themselves. In this sense, Picasso's Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930) are two choreographs of the human body in motion or kinegraphs which are approaching ideography or calligraphy. Thus Samuel Beckett is absolutely right when he says that in language as gestures the spoken and the written are identical.¹⁵ R. G. Collingwood too makes the perceptive observation that every language is a specialized from of bodily gesture and thus the dance is the mother of all languages.¹⁶ Similarly, Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker declare that "In contrast to phonetic letters, the ideograph is a vortex that responds to lines of force. It is a mask of corporate energy."¹⁷ In essence, each ideogram is the frolicking of a thing or body. Speech itself is the dance of the tongue and the lips to the etheral tune of breath. No wonder the ancients—in Greece as well as in China and India—considered music, dance, drama and (oral) poetry as a familial union of performing arts. Poetry is the primordial union of the "word" and the "deed." It is of no surprise to know that saying or naming is "performative." For this reason cheng ming (the "rectification of names") has such an important niche in the fabric of Chinese and moral thought.¹⁸ Likewise, music too approaches and corresponds to human morality in Chinese thought: its nomos and ethos constitute morality.

III

Fenollosa's conception of the written Chinese characters is based on the idea that they are ideographical, i.e., the highly stylized pictures of things in motion as symbols or ideas. Following Fenollosa, Pound too views the Chinese ideogram not as "the picture of a sound" but as "the picture of a thing."¹⁹ Thus, every ideogram is a kind of ars poetica or, better, confirms the Horatian precept ut pictura poesis. Nonetheless, Oriental children do not learn how to read, write or decipher the meaning of an ideogram by decomposing or dissecting it into a picture or into a composite of simpler characters or radicals. An ideogram is learned as a whole script or a Gestalt: first, how it is pronounced and then how to identify its given meaning or meanings. The Orientals also learn how to write not in terms of a character as the moving picture of a thing but in terms of a number or combination of strokes.²⁰ This is not to say, however, that Fenollosa's and Pound's etymopoetics of the written Chinese characters is valueless, uninteresting or uninformative. On the contrary, I find the "decompositional" or "deconstructive" etymolinguistics rather enlightening and fascinating.²¹ Take the following examples of "hypograms" as the corporate insemination of other ideograms (ideograms upon and by ideograms) provided by Fenollosa himself: "East" is an entangling of "sun" with "tree" (i.e., the sun entangled in the branches of a tree in the early morning or at sunrise); "old" or "ancient" is a composite of "ten" and "mouth" ("ten" over "mouth," i.e., presumably referring to what has come down through the mouth for ten generations); and "truth" or "faithfulness" is a composite of "man" and "word" (i.e., man standing by his word). Two of my favorite characters are "humanity" and "sage." The former is a composite of "man" and "two" (i.e., two men standing together) and the latter is a composite of "ear," "mouth" and "king." As the "king" is the unifier of heaven, man and earth, the "sage" is the unifier of heaven, man and earth by speaking and hearing truthfully. Furthermore, for the Chinese "nature" is signified by the ideograms: "ten thousand" and "things" (i.e., it is "ten thousand things").

Recent grammatology as the literary theory of writing has acquired its preeminence with Jacques Derrida who considers Hegel as the first (Western) philosopher of writing. With Of Grammatology²² he holds the most recent copyright on grammatology and may even be cast as the "visionary father" of a new grammatology. It is a seminal work in the critical philosophy of language in general and of writing in particular—writing in the current French sense of écriture as an act autonomous or independent of the spoken or the phonetic. It is a deconstruction of photocentrism or logocentrism and ultimately of the (Western) metaphysics of presence since Plato. It is not wrong to say that Derrida's deconstructive grammatology is leaning toward the superiority of Oriental hieroglyphic or ideographic writing over Occidental alphabetic writing. Near the end of an important chapter "Of Grammatology as a Positive Science" in Of Grammatology, Derrida has a passage which refers to Fenollosa's and Pound's etymopoetics. To quote Derrida's passage fully: "This is the meaning of the work of Fenellosa [sic] 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. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all its historical significance."²³ Furthermore, Derrida uses some Chinese ideas in his Dissemination.²⁴

As Derrida's deconstructive grammatology, like Fenollosa's and Pound's etymopoetics, seeks an absolute interiorization of writing as an autonomous act, and because all three found in Chinese ideography what they regard as a perfect example of such interiorization, it is worth comparing the foundation of their poetics and linguistics. I suggest that this foundation is based on the issue of sound and sense in language and poetry. It is important to note that Derrida's grammatology, which focuses on the idea of the text and the decipherment of its (conceptual) signification rather than on the voice and sense, is perfectly consistent with his conceptualist thought. In the international symposium "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" organized in 1966 by the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, Derrida denied in no uncertain terms the existence of any perception whatsoever, for "perception is precisely a concept."²⁵ The contrast between Derrida's grammatology and Chinese writing is in a significant way the same as the contrast between the poetics of Mallarmé and that of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Interestingly enough, Pound himself declares in his ABC of Reading that "Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music."²⁶ The ultimate paradox—I say paradox because such concepts as "trace" and "différance" (deferment) indispensable to Derrida's grammatology are "time" concepts—of Derrida's grammatology lies in the fact that when it murders the voice and resurrects the text, it tends to shrink time and stretch space.

Admiring the poetic geniality of Shakespeare and the sense of musical delight—the rich sweetness of sound, rhythm, and melody—Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared: "The man that hath not music in his soul' can indeed never be a genuine poet."²⁷ In recent decades it was Roman Jakobson who established systematically for the first time the structural interrelatedness between poetics and linguistics: as poetics is concerned with verbal structure and linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, the former is an integral part of the latter.²⁸ Similarly, Fenollosa too argued: "My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written character, it is necessary to inquire how these universal elements of form which constitute poetics can derive appropriate nutriment."²⁹ Jakobson further mentions paronomasia as a technique of poetry (in alphabetic writing), that is, the use of words similar in sound which are drawn together in meaning as well: dove-love, light-bright, place-space, name-fame, etc. Of course, the use of homonyms is an important part of Chinese poetry. It is a technique of utilizing the same or similar sounds of multiple characters with different meanings. To accentuate the sound quality of poetry, we can conjecture that man's "first poetry" was a kind of music, while his "first speech" was a kind of song. While T. S. Eliot spoke of the "music of poetry," the composer Igor Stravinsky talked about the "poetry of music" which, when desophisticated, is rooted in folksong or oral poetry.³⁰ It seems quite natural to discover, therefore, that since time immemorial music has been the nomos and ethos of Chinese culture and its composition and performance correspond to the prescription of human conduct in the "rite" order.³¹ It is worth nothing that speaking of the art of Chinese poetry, James J. Y. Liu points out that Western translators and students of Chinese poetry totally ignore its tonal, acoustic, and auditory affects. Though admittedly it is difficult to translate the musical quality of poetry, reading a Chinese poem in translation resembles looking at a beautiful woman through a veil or a landscape through a mist. The "veil" or "mist" of Chinese poetry is monosyllable sound, homonym, rhyme, tone, pitch, alliteration, onomatopoeia, metric, consonance, assonance, etc. In accordance with the singing affect of the Chinese language in general, most Chinese readers chant rather than merely read verse aloud; and the Chinese syllables tend to produce a staccato affect rather than the legato rhythm of English or French verse.³²

In our critical commentary on Chinese grammatology as well as on grammatology as the study of language as writing, we would be remiss if we were to ignore thirteenth-century Chinese scholar Tai T'ung's Six Scripts (Lio Shu Ku)³³ which, he confessed, was a product of thirty years of hard work. The work in question deals with the six cardinal principles of Chinese ideographic writing. In his short but laborious work on Chinese writing, Tai produced what I. A. Richards has called "multiple definitions." One of these principles is the tracing of the phonetic or oral from which the written or chirographic developed in the Chinese language. This is the principle of ideographic writing as the articulation of speech. When applied, it becomes a deconstruction of grammatology by rhetoric or the study of language as speech acts. From this perspective, Fenollosa, Pound, and particularly Derrida are not so much wrong as one-sided, however seminal their grammatologies may be. In the first place, one "script" or principle of Chinese writing that Tai discusses is called pictorial, because the written characters are really the copies of the physical forms of objects in depiction. In addition, there is another "script" or principle called a "suggestive compound" or, better, an "associative compound" which is a "union of figures" in order to express an idea. These two principles govern Fenollosa's and Pound's analysis of Chinese etymopoetics. The other four "scripts" or principles are called "indicative," "deflected," "adoptive," and "phonetic." Among these six principles of Chinese writing, the most important is the "phonetic" principle for our critical analysis. According to Tai, this principle says that "Written figures spring from spoken sounds."³⁴ Therefore, it is one-sided to say that Chinese writing in its total structure or configuration is purely grammatology or the study of writing as an autonomous act independent of the phonetic. As a matter of fact, Tai is critical of those "etymologists" who knew nothing of the principle of phonetic composition. Ultimately, Tai proposed the idea of the Chinese language as the "diatactics"³⁵ of the spoken and the written. In other words, (Chinese) writing is the "abstract" form of "concrete" speech. As Tai wrote, "The Sonant Form precedes, the Written Form follows; but as without written signs, spoken sounds could not be represented to the eye, I place first the written form and subjoin the spoken sound. The spoken sound is the yang . . . , the written sign the yin . . . , the spoken sound is the warp, the written sign the woof: the spoken sound is the circle, the written sign the square: the spoken sound is complete, the written sign incomplete."³⁶ In essence, according to Tai, the principal aim of Chinese writing is simply this: 'tï make speech visible. "³⁷

IV

Fenollosa is not concerned with defining the concept of language as a medium, although it is a key word in his work in question. Understandably so, because he is concerned primarily with the nature of poetry and how the written Chinese character is in itself poetry. The question of language as a medium of communication is a natural result of the development of highly sophisticated communication technologies.³⁸ Marshall McLuhan must be singled out as a high priest of the "medium" age who heralded the advent of recent electronic communication technologies. For our purpose here, two things must be noted. First, McLuhan is an anti-visualist and his opposition to "typographic" man and culture is vividly evidenced in his magnum opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy.³⁹ For him, typography epitomizes visualism and scales the height of "eye culture" and electronic technology is the second coming of (Homeric) oral culture accompanied by the intimate sense of touch. Oral culture is pre-literate, whereas the advent of electronic technology is post-literate in that it surpasses the world of literacy or writing. Second, McLuhan has, rightly or wrongly, a romantic sense of the Chinese ideogram as a vortex of corporate energy. Not unlike electricity, the Chinese ideogram arouses the sense of touch rather than that of sight. McLuhan reportedly said that the ideal form of his antitypographic treatise The Gutenberg Galaxy would have been ideograms or it would have been written as a galaxy of ideograms. While Derrida is a conceptualist who seems to have been attracted by the "abstract" aspect of Chinese ideography in order to substantiate his philosophical grammatology, McLuhan is, in contrast, a congenital perceptualist who seems to be attracted by the "sensorial" aspect of Chinese ideograms as the medium of communication. No doubt both of them are interested in (Oriental) ideographic writing as opposed to (Occidental) alphabetic writing. For Derrida ideographic writing is purged of phoneticism, while for McLuhan it is anti-visual and tactile. As a philosophical grammatologist, Derrida has no use for writing as a medium of communication. McLuhan's message and flamboyant style are unmistakably clear in the following passage from his interview with Playboy in 1969:

Any culture is an order of sensory preferences, and in the tribal world, the senses of touch, taste, hearing and smell were developed, for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly visual. Into this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy propelled man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay with visual linear values and fragmented consciousness. As an intensification and amplification of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating the discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and visual mode that we still consider the norm of "rational" existence. The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished "individuals," or units; functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space.⁴⁰

McLuhan was initially trained in English literature. As we have already noted, he is interested in Chinese ideography as a unique medium of communication, although he has no direct reference to Fenollosa as far as I can determine.⁴¹ However, it is worth noting that in The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan pays a high tribute to his Canadian predecessor and the pioneering philosopher of the medium, Harold A. Innis, when he acknowledges that it is "a footnote of explanation" to Innis' work. The Bias of Communication by Innis⁴² pertains to the cross-cultural theory of communication in the fast moving context of history in which the medium or the technology of communication itself is a determining factor. Relying on the work of the French sinologist Marcel Granet, Innis observes that the Chinese are not noted for formulating concepts and doctrines discursively and, by the same token, the Chinese ideogram too is not conducive to abstraction or generality but instead it evokes a multitude of concrete images. Neither time nor space is abstractly conceived by the Chinese: time is circular or round, while space is square. Innis quotes the idea of Fenollosa that poetry, like music, is a time art.⁴³ As we have already noted, Tai too used the circle and the square as metaphors of describing the spoken sound and the written sign, respectively.

For McLuhan as for Innis the idea of language as a medium of communication is singularly important. McLuhan single-handedly sloganized the highly charged idea that "the medium is the message." For McLuhan (as for Innis), it is the medium of communication that shapes and controls the structures of the human mind, sensorium and association. "For," McLuhan explains, "the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind."⁴⁴ Moreover, the content of any medium is always another medium. For Fenollosa the Chinese written character is a medium or vehicle for poetry, whereas in the language of McLuhan it is poetry. A critical point must be made here. Certainly the way of language is the unity of meaning and the medium itself which are inextricably linked. To dichotomize the "message" and the "medium" or to reduce one to the other is to misunderstand this inextricable linkage between the two. In a very significant sense, however, language is not merely a medium of communication if by the medium we mean the "third factor" that facilitates human communication (i.e., instrumental artifact). For, indeed, it is communication. To understand the extent to which language is an instrumental artifact of communication, we must distinguish writing from speaking. Writing is an artifact, whereas speaking is not. Speech becomes an artifact only when it is transcribed in visible marks. To be an artifact, writing must be supplemented by other artifacts (e.g., papyrus, paper, printing, tapes, TV screens). Writing, in essence, is a mediated medium, whereas speaking is an unmediated medium for human communication.

V

Fenollosa's etymolinguistic analysis of Chinese ideograms has produced many ripples and waves in the contemporary philosophy of reading, writing and communication. Whether Chinese ideography is just a grammatology or a unique medium of communication is the question that has been essential to the critical understanding of Derrida's philosophical grammatology and McLuhan's "medium" theory of communication. Whether Fenollosa's influence has been a joy or an anxiety, the important point to be made here is the fact that in its ultimate efficacy misreading is also a form of reading. We have attempted to show that Chinese ideography is not a grammatology as the pure and simple act of writing purged of the phonetic (contra Derrida). Nor is it a medium devoid of symbolic contents (contra McLuhan). First of all, poetry needs music to become alive as does dance. Second, the ideogram is iconographic; that is to say, it is not just physiographic or the mirror-image of a thing in motion as in painting or choreography. As Fenollosa put it, it is the verbal idea of action in that it converts "material images" into "immaterial relations": in every ideogram, which is also a metaphor, the pictorial becomes the symbolic. As a proper sign or symbol, every ideogram has a double feature: external "indication" and meaningful "ex/pression." Like the Jaina parable of five blind men each of whom touches only a portion of an elephant and claims that his description of the beast is right and the others are wrong and ignorant, Chinese ideography had had different appeals to and sometimes blinding or hypnotizing effects on different theorists—among whom Derrida and McLuhan are a striking contrast—who siphon from it only what is useful or acceptable for validating and advancing their own theories of language and communication. Their readings are not so much wrong as one-sided.

In the end we need a method of "multiple definitions" after the fashion of Tai T'ung in order to remedy this onesided reading or misreading, that is, to comprehend the composite picture of Chinese ideography as a whole tapestry with a mosaic of icons woven into it.

NOTES

¹ For a well-researched article on Fenollosa's and Pound's conception of Chinese grammatology, see Achilles Fang, "Fenollosa and Pound," Harvard Journal of Asian Studies, 20 (1957): 213-238. Fenollosa belongs to the long genealogy of linguistic sinology rooted in Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, William Warburton, and Wilhelm Leibniz, A critical genealogy of the ideogrammic method in American poetry as found now is Laszlo K. Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1982). I am grateful to Lloyd Burkhart, my colleague in the English Department, for bringing this book to my attention.

² See John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980). There is neither mention of Fenollosa nor discussion of Chinese grammatology in the book.

³ Fenollosa's magnum opus is a posthumously published work on the history of Chinese and Japanese art. See Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1912). He also wrote poetry including "East and West" which celebrates the meeting of the yin of the "markedly feminine" East and the yang of the "markedly masculine" West. See East and West, the Discovery of America, and Other Poems (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1893).

⁴ James A. Winn makes an astute observation when he writes that "Pound's fascination with Chinese ideograms, beyond their alleged visual expression, lay in the fact that one ideogram might be made out of several others like a chord out of several notes." Unsuspected Eloquence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 297.

⁵ For discussions of the thesis that Chinese ideography reflects the practically- and concretely-minded attitude, see Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), pp. 175-294; Herrlee Glessner Creel, Sinism (Chicago: Open Court, 1929); and Marcel Granet, La Pensée Chinoise (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1934).

⁶ See Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964). It is no secret that there have been the inseparable ties between painting, calligraphy and poetry, and that painting and calligraphy are the two facets of brushwork. Moreover, the idea of ch'i (vital energy) permeates all of these activities. See Maimai Sze, The Tao of Painting (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1963), Chap. IV, "The Elements of a Picture," pp. 75-104. In "Water and Ice" the Japanese painter Hiro Kamimura plays with the differentiation of the two graphemes by a single stroke or by the absence and presence of a single stroke. For a recent "interartistic" treatise on painting and literature, see Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

⁷ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (New York: Lovell, Coryell, n.d.), p. 21.

⁸ Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, p. 22.

⁹ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 18.

¹⁰ Emerson, Essays, p. 10.

¹¹ Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, p. 21.

¹² Ibid., p. 23. Cf. Johannes Lohmann who refers to the Chinese as "the most economical man on earth" and to their language as "equally economical" which is not unlike Fenollosa's conception of poetry. See "M. Heidegger's 'Ontological Difference' and Language," in On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 338.

¹³ In this regard, Giambattista Vico made the following, interesting observation: ".. . in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake, a saw, a comb; the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe; the gorge of a river; a neck of land, an arm of the sea; the hands of a clock; heart for center (the Latins used umbilicus, navel, in this sense); the belly of a sail; foot for end or bottom; the flesh of fruits; a vein of rock or mineral; the blood of grapes for wine; the bowels of the earth. Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves murmur; a body groans under a great weight. The farmers of Latium used to say the fields were thirsty, bore fruit, were swollen with grain; and our rustics speak of plants making love, vines going mad, resinous trees weeping. Innumerable other examples could be collected from all languages." The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 88, para. 405.

¹⁴ See Chang Cheng-ming, L'Ecriture Chinoise et le Geste Humain (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1937).

¹⁵ Samuel Beckett, "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," in Samuel Beckett et al, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Shakespeare, 1929), p. 11.

¹⁶ R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford, En gland: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 243-244. Cf. Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schonberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), p. 3: "The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space."

¹⁷ Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 39. The opposite page is filled with the Chinese ideogram language or word whose "acrobatic" character is represented by printing it upside down! Nevertheless, McLuhan and Parker speak of "an alphabetic ballet of words in rite order" in order to characterize E. E. Cumming's poem "Chanson Innocent" [ibid., pp. 186-187].

¹⁸ For a discussion on this matter, see Hu Shih, The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China, 2nd ed. (New York: Paragon, 1963), Chap. V, "The Rectification of Names and Judgments," pp. 46-52.

¹⁹ Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 21.

²⁰ I am a Korean by birth and I learned how to read Chinese initially from a Japanese teacher—probably the same way as Fenollosa learned Chinese—and later from my grandfather.

²¹ I mean to use the term deconstruction in the original sense that Martin Heidegger uses the term destruction as "a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn." See The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 23. Walter J. Ong notes that "With work such as Derrida's, philosophy, which as a formal discipline depends on a certain interiorization of writing, becomes acutely and exquisitely aware of its own chirographic framework, but has not yet much attended to the orality out of which the chirographic has developed historically and in which it is always in some way embedded. It may be worth noting that Derrida's key distinction between différence and différance (his neologism) is not phonemic, but chirographic." Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 17, n. 1. The American "deconstructionist" Paul de Man plays with the "literal" meaning and the "figurative" meaning of Archie Bunker's rhetoric: Archie Bunker answers "What's the difference?" when his wife Edith asks him whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under. When his answer really means "I don't give a damn what the difference is," the literal meaning of "difference" is denied by the figurative meaning. Since Derrida is an archie de-Bunker (a de-bunker of the arche or origin), there is indeed the difference between différence and différance in his deconstructive grammatology. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 8-9, Of course, the frequently cited example of the idea of "difference" in deconstructive rhetoric is a line from William Butler Yeats' poem "Among School Children": "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" The following Japanese haiku is also a play on the imagistic "difference": "The fallen blossom files back to its branch: A butterfly."

²² Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). The beginning of Derrida's deconstructive grammatology can be traced to his long introduction to his 1962 French translation of Edmund Husserl's "The Origin of Geometry" (1939) where Husserl makes reference to the important function of writing or written expression as making human communications possible without immediate or mediate personal address. For Derrida's 1962 introduction to Husserl's "The Origin of Geometry," see Edmund Husserl' s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, ed. David B. Allison and trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. (Stony Brook, N. Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978). In my judgment, Husserl's critique of the Galilean origin of modern scientism exemplifies phenomenology as philosophical deconstruction. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1970) which includes "The Origin of Geometry," pp. 353-378. The most redeeming quality of Derrida's grammatology in the context of this paper is this: his rejection of logocentrism or alphabetic writing as the surrogate of speech which is characteristic of Western metaphysics, is also the rejection of Western ethnocentrism or what Edward W. Said calls "Orientalism." See Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). In discussing the origin of language, the eighteenth-century seminal Neapolitan thinker Gimabattista Vico agreed with Aristotle in defining grammar as the art of writing rather than speaking. Vico observed that being mute initially, the first nations all originally spoke in writing. Mutes made themselves understood by the use of gestures or objects which were related to the ideas they wished to signify (i.e., by sign languages). In short, they spoke in hieroglyphics or ideographics. As Beckett already noted judiciously in the Vichian tradition, the spoken and the written are the same in language as a system of gestures. See Vico, The New Science, especially paras. 429, 225, 401, 434, and 435. Cf. Vico: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Leon Pompa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 233.

²³Of Grammatology, p. 92.

²⁴ Trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). For the "power" of hierography and ideography, see also his "Scribble (Writing-Power)," Yale French Studies, No. 58 (1979): 117-147.

²⁵ Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. 272. In Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), Michael Ryan comments that "Deconstruction deals for the most part with how we conceive the world" [p. 159]. There is, I think, a profound irony or paradox in a deconstructive interplay between con/ception and per/ception in their literal and figurative meanings. Whereas the notion of "conception" in Derrida's deconstructive grammatology after the tradition of Hegel becomes disembodied and desexualized, there is an embodied and sexualized way of defining "conception" or "to conceive." In the Vichian tradition, Elizabeth Sewell points out that the body fertilizes the process of conceptual thinking with language: in grammar there is a gender as masculine, feminine or neuter and also in grammatical terminology, there are "copula" and "conjugation." In grammar, the body is as much operative as the mind. If, as Sewell maintains, grammar is "a choreography of language and mind," that is, it is bodily and sexual, then Fenollosa's contention as noted earlier that Chinese ideography, like nature, knows no grammar must be examined in a different light. For a discussion of the anatomy of grammar as embodied and sexualized, see Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 34-41. It was Vico who defined man as "only mind, body and speech" and speech as standing somewhere "midway between mind and body." See Vico, The New Science, p. 347, para. 1045 and see also the author's paper "Vico's Rhetoric: A Note on Verene's Vico's Science of Imagination," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 15 (Summer 1982): 187-202.

²⁶ Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 61.

²⁷ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographic Literaria, 2 vols. (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), II: 14. In Poetry and the Physical Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), Francis Berry comments that "I am indeed halfpersuaded by those who urge that the origin of a poem lies not in sound but in seeing" [p. ix]. In Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, trans. John Mepham (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), Roman Jakobson advances the idea that "In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value,. .. sound symbolism (i.e., the symbolic value of phonemes as signifiers] becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified" [p. 113].

²⁸ See Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-377.

²⁹ Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, p. 6.

³⁰ The conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein attempts to synthesize music and linguistics (Noam Chomsky's linguistics) in The Unanswered Question (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).

³¹ See one of the Chinese classics: 1 Chi: Book of Rites, 2 vols., trans. James Legge (New Hyde Park, N. Y.: University Books, 1967), II: 92-131 (Book XVII). Speaking of the locus of the personal as moral performance embodied in the Confucian thought of li (rite) and jen (humanity), Herbert Fingarette writes: "We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, 'faking,' sentimentalizing.' We detect all this in the performance; we do not have to look into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all 'there,' public. Although it is there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as 'the Beethoven Opus 3' (that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a 'public concert' (the li perspective), nor as 'post-Mozartian opus' (the style perspective), but primarily as this particular person's performance (the personal perspective)." Confucius—The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 53.

³² James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 20-38. This is also one of the main arguments that George Kennedy advances in "Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character," Yale Literary Magazine, 126 (December 1958): 24-36.

³³ Tai T'ung, The Six Scripts; or, the Principles of Chinese Writing, trans. L. C. Hopkins (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1954).

³⁴ Ibid., p. 27.

³⁵ I borrowed the term diatactics from Hayden White which means to modify Hegel's and Marx's notions of dialectic. Diatactics is neither "hypotactical" (Hegelian conceptual overdetermination) nor "paratactical" (Marxian conceptual underdetermination). See Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 4. I like the term especially because it implies the intimate sense of touch or tactility.

³⁶ Tai, The Six Scripts, p. 33. For an excellent discussion of the Chinese logic of correlations in reference to the theory of language and knowledge, see Chang Tung-sun, "A Chinese Philosopher's Theory of Knowledge," in Our Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 299-324.

³⁷ Tai, The Six Scripts, p. 43. See also passages in pp. 4-5, 27, and 31. Cf. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 267: "verse is speech having a marked figure," it is a "figure of spoken sound."

³⁸ For discussions on the various "medium" issues, see Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (eds.), Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960).

³⁹ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). For a critical assessment of McLuhan, see the author's paper "The Medium as Technology: A Phenomenological Critique of Marshall McLuhan," in Phenomenology and the Understanding of Human Destiny, ed. Stephen Skousgaard (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of Ameica, 1981), pp. 45-80.

⁴⁰ Marshall McLuhan, "Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan," Playboy (March 1969): 59.

⁴¹ It might be of some relevance to our discussion that Hugh Kenner, a noted scholar on Pound, dedicated his The Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1968) to McLuhan: "A catalogue, his jewels of conversation."

⁴² (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951) which has a critical introduction by McLuhan. An account of Innis' intellectual achievement is found in Eric A. Havelock, "Harold Innis: A Man of His Times," Et Cetera, 38 (Fall 1981): 242-268.

⁴³ Innis, The Bias of Communication, p. 106.

⁴⁴ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 18.