Fenollosa

Fenollosa is afraid of dead language seeping into poetics, static language that is no longer capable of indicating process and wholly concerned with expressing contained and complete states of unbecoming: “My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language.” He continues to assert by comparing Gray’s line with a Chinese line that poetry is the process contained in a “necessary order” which is permitted by “a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself,” of words. This sequence allows “a reproduction of [the transferences of force from agent to object which constitute natural phenomena, occupy time] in the imagination requires the same temporal order.”

Fenollosa recognizes that a transcription of the experience of a process determined spatially and temporally is often at odds with traditional/grammaticized descriptions that follow their own rules divorced from the logic (or lack there of) of material reality and experience. The notion is that the poetical does not appropriate structures that were created for a different and equally individual experiences: content and form are inextricably intertwined in unique and “necessary” combinations. By following this order, Fenollosa expresses belief that the original work done, mimed in the poem, is somehow maintained, that the audience coming across the poetical will experience that same effort of production that stimulates rather than an experience of the static which dulls: “the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal definitions in dictionaries”; “In reading [the poetical] we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate.”

The poetical nature of the Chinese character that is so intriguing to Fenollosa is encompassed in the character’s tendency to express experience through “the meeting points of actions,.. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things.” In the examples he presents, the definition is clearly dependent on the particular definitions syntactical functions in/on reality.

This understanding of the poetical, especially the description Fenollosa gives of different understandings of “to shine” on pg 372 espousing the Chinese “sun-and-moon” reminded me of Shelley’s description of the poetical as the apprehension of similitude. When Fenollosa asserts that “languages to-say are thin and cold because we thing less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning” I get the feeling that he is criticizing a trend to pin words down into generalities, dictionary definitions of states, rather than allowing them their “plastic” possibility and widest “edge of meaning” which might be narrowed to the specific context, “order of causation,” by syntax, by the meeting without denying the shadows and wind, which unseen chill the air.

I feel like my highschool english teacher who told us successfull essays came from a dance between the general and the specific. Time to stop.