The Chinese Character (pt. 2): Ezra Pound’s Cinematic Calligraphy

‘Character’ is, quite obviously, a polysemous word. In my last entry, I employed it, primarily, to designate Shosho, thereby allowing ‘the Chinese character’ to realise semantic connotations based on identity and other living qualities. I then employed ‘character’ to designate the symbols of Shosho’s writing which, I asserted, metaphorise the aggregate of features that constitute her as a subject. Subsequently, the written Chinese character was attributed with similar qualities of otherness I posited on Shosho. Now, in this entry I intend to focus solely on the written character, but as I do so I hope to keep in mind Shosho’s character – for here, I will be once more arguing for a certain transcendent dynamism inherent in the Chinese character – and thereby extend an implicit otherness to the written character to be discussed henceforth, and a further dynamism to the living character discussed hereto.

Modernist poet Ezra Pound composed vast amounts of poetry in a style he christened ‘the Ideogrammic Method’ – a technique which allowed poetry to deal with abstract content through concrete images. A more notable example of Pound’s Ideogrammic poetry is as follows:

            In a Station of the Metro
The apparition             of these faces             in the crowd             :
Petals             on a wet, black             bough             .

The inspiration for “In a Station of the Metro” came to Pound one day as he exited a Metro train and was arrested by the image recorded above. Pound stated that for him, this was the beginning of a language in colour. And, consequently, this poem reads as though it is a painting and evokes the imagist principle that a poem may build its effects out of things it sets before the mind’s eye by naming them. The poem’s title – “In a station of the Metro” – presents the viewer with a large canvas: the train station. And as the poem progresses for its following two lines, the viewer’s attention is drawn to specific concrete elements of the painting: “these faces in the crowd”. Such reading is affirmed by the visual placement of words as the individual lines of the poem are, too, broken up into distinct images similar to how a large painting is viewed. For instance, the second line reads:

The apparition             of these faces             in the crowd             :

This spatial division between images gives the impression of someone viewing the faces in a painting and then changing their focus to once again observe the crowd as a whole. Here, it is evident that Pound’s poetry has taken on a visual logic: the logic of painting, as his poetry captures still images that can be explicated to their metaphorical potential.

However, the diachronic process of reading reveals the limits of attempting to depict reality by such logic: in spite the concreteness of the images generated, the process of reading strips the poetry of the element of natural succession or, more significantly in this case, the scope of the apparition in its entirety. To wit, instead of displaying the truth of visual perception, “In a Station of the Metro” suspends still images in time, and then orders them syntactically.

This limitation, like the textual cinemascape of Piccadilly, acts as a frame. The English text is stable, familiar, and order imposing. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the Chinese character (the ideogram) within such poetry warps its frame – as does the Chinese character in Piccadilly – and shatters the static order of the poem.

Visually striking, the ideogram acts as a sort of hieroglyphic verbal-noun. As Ernest Fenollosa writes in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1936), “the great number of these ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action” (p. 9). For instance, the following ideogram and its translation are taken from Pound’s Confucius the Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot (1951):

The light descending (from the sun,
moon and stars.) To be watched as
com­ponent in ideograms indicating
spirits, rites, ceremonies.

Here, the ideograph depicts the poetic subject both visually and temporally, in one instantaneous gesture. Chinese poetry, writes Fenollosa,

“speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate” (p. 9).

This – the watching of things in their own fate – is cinematic. The preceding Chinese character does not merely signify the light descending from the heavens; rather, is depicts such taking place: the light is cast down (the three vertical strokes) from the sky (the two horizontal strokes), and the visualisation is generated as though the sunlight is taking place on film.

The “thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words, but far more vividly and concretely,” and, consequently, the ideogram “holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture” (p. 8). The Chinese character, as it is included within English poetry, is dynamic – it transcends its frame as does Shosho in Piccadilly – and adds a new dimension to poetry: the cinematic.

Works Cited:

Fenollosa, Ernest. 1936. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, edited by Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Pound, Ezra. 1916-17. “In a Station of the Metro”. In Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth. United States: The Library of America: 287.

__________. 1951. Confucius: the Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot. In Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth. United States: The Library of America: 615-650.