欧内斯特·费诺罗萨笔下的近代远东

论文总字数：88428字

摘 要

在现代主义研究中，新兴的现代主义东方主义研究虽已在中日传统文化与欧美现代主义之间建立了丰富的联系，却倾向于忽视近代东亚的政治、文化现实与现代主义及现代性之间的重要关联。同时，现代主义研究倾向于将日本现代主义和中国现代主义看成次要的现代主义，即对欧美现代主义的模仿。在东方学者、翻译家欧内斯特·费诺罗萨的研究中，学者公认其提出的汉字诗学是现代主义诗歌变革的先驱理论，但他作品中许多对近代时事的犀利评论却很少获得关注。鉴于这两点，本文从费诺罗萨作品中针对近代东亚国家的讨论入手，探讨他眼中近代中日两国将在世纪之交扮演的重要文化、政治、历史角色，及其与现代主义与现代性变革的紧密关联。

对费诺罗萨相关文献进行分析后可以得出如下结论。从文化角度来看，费诺罗萨指出，中日将为现代主义提供诗歌变革的灵感和哲学变革的参照；从政治角度来看，费诺罗萨分析了东亚即将面临的战争危机和政治机遇，辨析了东亚国家与欧美国家之间的紧密政治联系；从历史角度来看，费诺罗萨强调东亚文化与西方文化的融合发展趋势，并预言了近代中日两国将在西方影响下产生自己的现代主义，即初期的中国现代主义和日本现代主义。与同时代的学者相比，费诺罗萨积极关注近代东亚的文化与政治变革，其关于东亚的相关论述是研究东亚与现代主义关系的重要资料来源。

关键词：欧内斯特·费诺罗萨；东亚；现代主义；现代性；现代主义东方主义

Abbreviations

CWC The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica.

CJT Chinese and Japanese Traits.

CI Chinese Ideals.

ECJA Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art.

RJAG Remarks on Japanese Art in General.

SL Synopsis of Lecture on Chinese and Japanese Poetry.

CWL The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry.

CF The Coming Fusion of East and West.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

English Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Abbreviations iv

Introduction 1

Ernest Fenollosa and Modernism 1

Literature Review on Fenollosa Studies 2

East Asia in Modernist Orientalism Studies 4

Thesis Structure 6

Chapter One Cultural Duties of China and Japan in Modern Reform 8

1.1 Provider of Inspiration for Poetic Reform 8

1.2 Provider of Solution for Spiritual Dilemma 12

Chapter Two Political Positions of China and Japan in Modern Development 17

2.1 Harbinger of War Crisis 17

2.2 Herald of Political Opportunity 22

Chapter Three Historical Roles of China and Japan in Modern Fusion 26

3.1 Bride in a Cultural Marriage 27

3.2 Incubator of a Global Fusion 29

Conclusion 33

Works Cited 36

Introduction

Ernest Fenollosa and Modernism

No figure has had a more fundamental impact on poetic modernism than Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, a prominent translator and Orientalist whose writings stimulated early literary modernist development. Best known for his often-cited essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”, he promotes a reconstructed form of Anglophone poetry based on his beguiling notion of Chinese ideograms being closest to poetic and natural truth. His manuscripts, posthumously confided to, reedited and published by the modernist poet Ezra Pound, famously provide inspirations for the ideogrammatic method central to imagism, a pivotal movement in early modernism.

Verily, Fenollosa’s poetic prophecy establishes him as “a forerunner without knowing it and without being known as such” in modernist history (Pound “Instigations”, 67). But it is also arguably true that his widely acclaimed essay on Chinese ideograms, recognized as the genesis of imagist movement, overshadows another important aspect of his career, a career highly dedicated to the facilitation of understanding between the modern East and the modern West, more specifically, to the presentation of a comprehensive and unbiased picture of contemporary East Asia to the Anglo-American world he came from^[1]. If one inspects the list of Fenollosa’s writings, as shown in the archives of Fenollosa Papers at Houghton Library website, it will not be of any difficulty to realize that the discourses he produced on Chinese and Japanese subjects were well-nigh as many as those on purely poetic topics. Compared with Pound’s compliment, Haun Saussy’s confirmation of him as “a mediator between civilizations” (28) seems a more fitting epitaph to Fenollosa’s career as half a translator and half a philosopher. It was precisely with the aspiration of becoming such a mediator that Fenollosa approaches and dissects the challenges, opportunities and responsibilities facing modern China and modern Japan at the turn of the century.

Literature Review on Fenollosa Studies

Most systematic studies on Fenollosa have been centered on his most renowned and most controversial essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”, in which he eminently honours Chinese ideograms as an optimal carrier of poetic beauty, and raises his rudimentary promotion for linguistic reform in modern English poetry (Chisolm; Fang; Géfin). Some linguists, represented most famously by George A. Kennedy, have argued in defiance of the canonical status of the essay in poetic modernism by criticizing Fenollosa’s naive misunderstanding of Chinese ideograms as of having no phonetic but only pictorial origins (Kennedy 452; Jung “Misreading” 211). However, a near consensus has been reached in this regard that Fenollosa’s essay should be viewed as a contextualized poetic manifesto in modernist studies, rather than a rigorous linguistic analysis.

In recent decades, considerable endeavour has been made to clarify the essay’s textual history, mostly in order to restore Fenollosa’s original text from its better-known Poundified version, and among them the most recent and most thorough effort is the critical edition edited by Haun Saussy and other scholars in 2008. Questions have been posed on how much of Fenollosa’s original text was twisted by Pound’s capricious taking-what-is-most-needed editing, and how much of Fenollosa’s initial intention has been altered and obscured. It has also been discovered that apart from reshaped viewpoints and deleted arguments, the most widely circulated version of this essay also omits Fenollosa’s early discussions about contemporary Asian politics. While more discourse has been generated on the adulteration Pound made to the essay in fulfillment of his poetic promotion, much less scholarly attention has been paid to the neglected part of Fenollosa’s ruminations on the modern Far East, paragraphs that may contain significant clues to Fenollosa’s geopolitical viewpoints on the role of modern China and Japan in modernism.

Despite the fact that Fenollosa’s other writings, less notable than “The Chinese Written Character” essay, are seldom individually specified upon in an academic sense, they have indeed been associated with a fair amount of research in modern art history and modern philosophy. Some studies elaborate on Fenollosa’s discrete discourse over the value of traditional Japanese arts in order to amplify his contribution to the forming of modern art, both in Asia and in the US (Arndt; Tanaka; Williams B. L.). Some other studies focus on the part of Fenollosa’s manuscript on Japanese Noh drama, primarily “Certain Noble Plays of Japan”, and track its influence on later compositions of Pound and Yeats (Miyake; Nicholls; Rosenow). A more recent interdisciplinary research even applies international relation theories to Fenollosa’s etymosinology in the context of global communication (Jung “Etymosinology”).

Focused exploration of Fenollosa’s single essays is conducted by three separate scholars -- Christopher Bush, Haun Saussy and Ito Yutaka. Bush draws one of Fenollosa’s essays on global fusion into a comparison with other contemporary texts on global future in his insightful article “Why Not Compare?”, and shed much light on comparative textual investigation; Saussy, taking “The Chinese Written Character” as a departure point notwithstanding, includes a much wider range of Fenollosa’s manuscripts, essays, notes and correspondence into the discussion of ideogrammatic aesthetics, and offers a contextualized analysis of how some of Fenollosa’s writings on East Asia distinguish him from his contemporaries; Ito, who endeavours to summarize the poetic and philosophical thoughts of Fenollosa, produces more of a chronological record of his turbulent life journey. Nevertheless, when a systematic account of Fenollosa’s standpoints on the Far East is sought, extant studies are either too narrow in perspectives, or too fragmented in texts, that is to say, a more comprehensive recognition of Fenollosa’s view on modern East Asian issues is still in need.

East Asia in Modernist Orientalism Studies

The term modernist Orientalism is a literal combination of the word modernism and the word Orientalism, though it is a field sharing very few similarities with either of the two^[2]. Zhao Yiheng is one of the earliest scholars who ushered in the study of Far Eastern influence upon Euro-American modernism with his Chinese book The Muse from Cathay in 1985, ten years before there was a guiding theory. After that, the ground-breaking contribution in the field of modernist Orientalism is Zhaoming Qian’s 1995 publication of Orientalism and Modernism, in which he thoroughly retraces and systematically analyzes the incalculable influence of classical Chinese poetry on works of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and more significantly, coins the term “modernist Orientalism”. Placed in a modernist context, this new notion of Orientalism, dissimilar to Edward Said’s analysis of Oriental representations in Occidental literature, refers to the studies of positive Far-Eastern influence on Anglo-American modernism. It demonstrates, in Chinese scholar Gao Fen’s words, a more interactive and more positive East-West relationship, and thus would become the lens through which a less partial scenery of modern communication can be seen (4). After this notion being gradually accepted into the broader domain of modernist studies, many scholars entering the field of modernist Orientalism, i.e. Eric Hayot, Robert Kern, Cynthia Stamy, William W. Bevis, Patricia O. Laurence, Gu Mingdong, Hakutani Yoshinobu, have explored in great detail the role Far-Eastern traditions played in Anglo-American modernism, thus rendering this arena of study an accelerating “bull market” (Williams R. J. 513). Since the beginning of this century, according to Ou Rong, a series of international academic conferences have also been held in both Euro-American and Asian institutions, such as University of Cambridge in England and Zhejiang University in China, with a purpose of enriching the topic of modernism and the Orient (69). Nonetheless, as Christopher Bush points out, “much of what we might today call modernist Orientalism either explicitly disavowed any relationship to a contemporaneous, or even a real East, or did such a poor job of understanding it that it might as well have” (“Modernism” 194). Although the achievements mentioned above have successfully dispelled the false presupposition in the past that the classical heritage of East Asia was inconsequential to modernism, there emerges a hesitation in believing that modern China and modern Japan as part of the modernizing world were also effecting actual changes on modernism and modernity^[3]. And such disconnection between modern Far East and the modern West is just another way of denying East Asia’s significance in modernist history.

My research on Fenollosa’s perception of the modern Far East is exactly conducted against such hesitation, and in defense of the substantive roles modern East Asia once played in modernism and modernity. It is supposed to serve as an example of reframing the relationship between modernism and colonial realities, and to strive for a more comprehensive recognition of modernism as a whole. My conviction that a translator should be investigated draws inspiration from Christopher Bush’s “Modernism, Orientalism and East Asia”, in which the analysis of Paul-Louis Couchoud’s writings implies that translators, who help disseminate Far-Eastern cultures to modernists, may possess global insights into the ongoing or predictions of the upcoming modernism (194). Therefore, Ernest Fenollosa has been chosen as the central focus of my study considering his fame as a modern translator connecting the East and the West, as well as his intellectual efforts paid to East Asian-related writings. It is thus worth our while to explore whether Fenollosa is a prophet translator, and if so, to analyze from full-scale perspectives his cultural, political and historical views on modern China and modern Japan, in order to scrutinize the relationship between modernism and the Far East.

Thesis Structure

In light of what is stated above, this research will investigate Fenollosa’s writings about the modern Far East, and how he believes these roles are closely related with the coming modernism and modernity. Here, the Far East means not simply the classical China and the classical Japan as aesthetic resources to extract, as has been commonly agreed in the modernist Orientalism arena, but also the modern China and the modern Japan, against a backdrop of worldwide turmoil, indispensably playing cultural, political and historical roles in a modernist future where East Asia and the West are interconnected.

This study takes Christopher Bush’s idea of “formal-aesthetic” and “geopolitical-historical” dimension to consider the relationship between modernism and East Asia, and reexamine the meaning of the Far East for Fenollosa (195). This means that instead of tracing the Chinese and Japanese artistic impact Fenollosa brought to modernists, of which there is no shortage within the modernist corpus, I will look into the writings of Fenollosa for reflections on modern realities of the Far East in the modernist context.

Three main chapters will be devoted respectively to the minute examinations of cultural, political and historical roles the Far East played in modernism, as Fenollosa in his writings germane to the subject directly demonstrates or indirectly indicates. The first chapter discusses the cultural responsibilities of preserving literary heritages that Fenollosa points out for the modernizing China as well as the modernizing Japan, and how his exceptional viewpoints form accurate predictions for the future literary and philosophical relationship between modernism and the Far East. The second chapter analyzes the political roles Fenollosa believes modern China and Japan would perform, and how ominous and positive signs of modernity that would be revealed in the modernizing process of the Orient are connected with the Western destiny. The last chapter illustrates the historical roles East Asia would perform in a future modernist fusion, one that Fenollosa envisions to resemble a harmonious East-West remarriage and that would produce a new modernism native to East Asia^[4]. Through the critical analysis of the above three vistas Fenollosa opens up in his writings, the final conclusion of my research is that Fenollosa, though never participating in the modernist movement himself, discerns the cultural, political and historical roles of East Asia in the coming modernism and modernity, and thus sharply expands the scope of modernism as being not entirely Euro-American centered, but inherently global. Therefore, this research should be seen as an attempt to help fill two newly-found research gaps in the modernist landscape: the idea that Fenollosa possesses global insight into modernism may call attention to further studies on writings of modern translators; the proposition that modern China and modern Japan have never been incidental to modernism may contribute to a renewed relationship between East Asia and modernism.

Chapter One Cultural Duties of China and Japan

in Modern Reform

Fenollosa came to the Far East in a time when both countries were facing radical cultural metamorphosis, with Chinese progressives impatiently overthrowing the putrescent domination of feudalism, and Japanese rulers greedily gulping down anything Euro-American. Both China and Japan, though via different methods, displayed great eagerness to embrace western modernization, and consequently, to dispose of their own cultural traditions as if throwing away useless and out-of-date antiques.

Against this cultural trend of blind westernization in East Asia, Fenollosa compellingly asserts that Oriental civilizations, though imperfect as all civilizations, were supposed to shoulder and were capable of shouldering equal cultural responsibilities compared to that of the West in the modern era (CJT 163). These responsibilities, he emphasizes, lied not in self-destruction, but in self-preservation. Fenollosa is so clearly aware of the significance of fulfilling this responsibility that he more than once suggests that for East Asia, to despise its own cultural traditions is to distance itself from modernism, and to properly preserve its conventions, at least in cultural aspects, is beneficial for the construction of a modernizing world culture.

1.1 Provider of Inspiration for Poetic Reform

Fenollosa, in his comparative analysis of Chinese and Japanese history, frequently identifies the preservation of inherited cultural legacy as a vital challenge Oriental counties had to confront in every historical period. It is no exception with the turn-of-the-century time Fenollosa was living in. Seeing the culture crisis taking place in East Asia, he implies in his writings that a civilization will lose its spiritual essence if it seeks progress, in this particular case seeks modernization, by way of excluding its own cultural origins, and that such loss in the Far East, if incurred and sustained, will deprive the world of half its cultural glamour.

For China and Japan, one important cultural duty Fenollosa lionizes in his writings was to preserve their own endangered classical heritage, poetry in particular, in preparation for a coming reform of modern poetic art. He puts such duty forward in an seemingly indirect but clearly emphatic way after witnessing the painful rejection of Far-Eastern literary traditions by Chinese and Japanese descendants themselves, who were supposed to preserve and inherit the literary heritage of their own ancestors, but instead chose to despise and attack it. Nevertheless, what these two East Asian nations brutally disdained and decisively discarded is treasured by Fenollosa as invaluable impulses for an unavoidable poetic reform in the Occidental literary world. This reform that Fenollosa anticipates, which he did not live up to see for himself, turns out to be imagism, a most crucial movement in modernist history.

In Fenollosa’s relevant writings, one distinguishing feature is his vehement opposition to the short-sighted literary westernization in East Asia. Such disapproving attitude comes partly from his discovery that such longing for Euro-American newness was derived from self-pity sentiment, and partly from his awareness that Chinese and Japanese poetic heritage possesses inspiring value for modern English poetry. Fenollosa rebuts the exasperatingly disturbing opinion in the Occidental world that dismissed Chinese and Japanese poetry as “hardly more than an amusement”, and thereby not serious enough to be recognized as a world literary treasure (CWC 42). Similar descriptions of belittlement, given in another essay “The Coming Fusion of East and West”, also show a widely accepted western depreciation of Far Eastern culture as a whole (153). Fenollosa is decidedly disappointed at the fact that East Asian poetic traditions were not only trampled upon in the East, but also devalued in the West, and subsequently embodies in his writings the wish of stopping unconscious damage and refuting ignorant claims.

Fenollosa’s wish to protect Chinese poetic traditions is amply demonstrated by his notable comments on Chinese written characters, which are believed to be the basic units representing the quintessential charm of Chinese poetry. This poetic medium Fenollosa highly values in “The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry”, his most celebrated essay composed circa 1906, was facing fierce attack from Chinese intellectuals themselves who were carried away by the almost fanatical trend of westernization and believed that ideogrammatic characters were symbolic of feudal backwardness. A “literary evolution” aiming at replacing classical language with vernacular language subsequently put classical Chinese poetry in a disgraceful situation (Gu 993). While overwhelming hostility to ideograms prevailed across the feeble old Cathay, Fenollosa uncommonly affirms the indispensable value of those Oriental pictorial signs in his posthumous essay. This essay is particularly powerful in that it was written against the bizarre backdrop that Chinese people were rejecting their own long-established language tradition and even turning to “alphabetization as a universal remedy” (Saussy 6). By standing out and speaking highly of the charming merit in Chinese written characters, whose value their direct descendants were busy disparaging and decrying, Fenollosa becomes the one who foresees in Chinese poetry a future for Anglo-American poetic reform, and who herein recognizes the immense aesthetic resource Chinese culture was to preserve and provide for poetic modernism.

Japanese poetry possesses a similar inspirational value by Fenollosa’s yardstick, nonetheless it was then a value unrecognized by Japanese themselves. Fenollosa notices that Japanese literature, including classical Japanese poetry, the essence of Japanese Zen philosophy, was in the same way experiencing a shock brought by the far-reaching Meiji reform in Japan. It is his description that the Japanese “were turning from all their old traditions and indulging in an orgy of foreignism” (ECJA xiv). Appalled at the degree to which modern Japanese culture abominated the ancient East and coveted the new West, Fenollosa even devoted himself to the protection of classical arts and literature (Saussy 11). He agrees with Chamberlain’s observation that Japan at that time harboured so much aversion to its own literary tradition that it resented any compliment on its “finer and more delicate tastes and faculties” (CJT 150). For Fenollosa, and later for Pound alike, Japan’s blind imitation would possibly reduce actual literary treasures to oblivion. In the eyes of Fenollosa, what proves truly universal to poetic beauty, and thus would become prized inspirations for poetic modernism, is nothing short of the natural clarity in Japanese haiku, which presents the same Far Eastern cultural charm as displayed by the pictographic vividness of Chinese poems. It surprised him that so few native Japanese were able to understand the priceless treasure the nation was losing, that “at such a crisis it should have been the keen eye and prophetic mind of a young American who first realized the threatened tragedy”, and that his foreign awareness went ridiculously unaccompanied (ECJA xv).

It is incontestable that Far-Eastern literature bears the exact virtue Fenollosa celebrates and promotes, and the exact ideal imagists later strive for in the English language. Chinese and Japanese poetry, as Fenollosa had prophesied, did exert transformative influence over the Anglo-American poetic world, a world at the time characterized by fusty Victorian gentilities and half decayed softness, a world long in need of fresh exotic air (Gu 999; Yoshinobu 6). Fenollosa’s prophecy is later consonant with the acknowledgment of Pound, who admitted that he was indebted to Japanese poetry, particularly haiku, when reflecting on his important works in poetic modernism, i.e. “In a Station of the Metro” (Yoshinobu 5). This leading imagist has also made the claim that the ideograms Fenollosa reveals to the western poetic world would be “the basis of a new universal language” (Saussy 7). Pound’s words might be taken as a slight exaggeration, but they set the tone for the future evaluations of Far-Eastern literature.

It was exactly this poetic prophecy that impels Fenollosa to accent the preservation duties of China and Japan, for he believes that classical Chinese and Japanese poetry possess reformative and inspirational value for the innovation of English poetry, and that China and Japan shall not shirk the duty to protect their own literary conventions. East Asian heritages, in Fenollosa’s view, are also heritages of the world. As providers of inspiration for a future poetic reform, China and Japan, while seeking literary remedy from the much more developed Western countries, were culturally responsible for preserving their own literary conventions. When literary modernism was still in its formative years, it would become an inescapable part of East Asia’s cultural duties to keep the balance between self-conceit and self-deprecation, and not to go too far from one extreme to another.

1.2 Provider of Solution for Spiritual Dilemma

When estimating the value of East Asia for the modern Western world, Fenollosa also pinpoints a spiritual dilemma peculiar to the Anglo-American modernization. Having observed the stark contrast between the prosperity of modern economy and the sterility of modern philosophy in the Occidental world, Fenollosa had in mind that this spiritual crisis would be in need of an Oriental cure. Following his description of such dilemma as an “Anglo Saxon crisis” in the lecture notes in 1903, Fenollosa continues to argue that Oriental ideals, in literary or philosophical works, may serve as effective solutions to spiritual decadence in modernization, one of the most universal problems confronting modern humanity (SL 114).

In this sense, the other cultural responsibility Fenollosa cites as important for East Asia is also about the preservation of its own Asiatic traditions, philosophical conventions this time. Similar to the above-mentioned idea that protecting Far Eastern poetic heritage would benefit poetic modernism, the purpose of protecting Far Eastern philosophical heritage, for Fenollosa, is to retain an exotic but effective solution to a modern spiritual dilemma presently surfacing in the West. However, different from the simple anti-western methods applied to the protection of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, the most desirable way Fenollosa suggests for the preservation of East Asian philosophy is, unexpectedly, to modernize itself.

This surviving-via-modernizing method was raised against the perilous way in which old Eastern philosophy was treated on their native lands. Fenollosa’s hostility to the philosophical policy of Meiji reformers is a perfect case in point. Regarding how to treat the old Far Eastern philosophy, Buddhist philosophy in particular, Fenollosa was holding a belief entirely opposite to the Japanese government, which was then occupied with cultural westernization tasks as part of the ongoing Meiji Restoration. But Fenollosa’s opposition was far from straightforward insomuch as he did so not by uttering direct reproach, but by revealing in his essays the persecution Japanese Buddhism faced, and more importantly, by pointing out the possible reviving opportunities Japanese philosophy would have in exerting positive influence on Anglo-American modernism and modernization.

Fenollosa was eminently sensible to the fact that Japanese Buddhist institutions, the preserving places of Japanese philosophical orthodoxy, would either reconcile or perish under brutal censorship and fierce critique (Sharf 3). It is clear that Fenollosa, who regards disappearance of any Far Eastern ideals as an irrevocable loss, believes that Japanese Buddhism’s adaptation to a modernizing environment would not only preserve Japanese philosophical heritage, but also help Japanese Buddhism bring about future changes in Buddhist modernism as a whole. While depicting the ruthless eradication of Buddhist establishments in a sympathetic tone, Fenollosa also indicates in his writings that a new Japanese Buddhism, one that holds fast to Asian traditions and accommodates itself to Westernization at the same time, should and would arise. This sort of reframed Japanese Buddhism, which Fenollosa prefigured, and to whose genesis Fenollosa indirectly contributed, in retrospect, was best corresponded by the later emergence of Shin Bukkyõ, also called New Buddhism. This reworked school of Mahayana Buddhism was said to have been partly generated by Fenollosa’s Japanese students, who cited Fenollosa’s teaching of Hegelian philosophy and Social Darwinism as major sources of inspiration (Saussy 20). In essence, New Buddhism was intended to become a reincarnated version of pure Buddhism, one that would get rid of superstitious ritual conventions and reach harmonious combination with modern scientific knowledge. In simple words, this modernized Buddhism bravely conducts an unprecedented self-reform -- it sets “the Law of Cause and Effect” as its fundamental science in place of the traditional belief that world phenomena are governed by mysterious external force (McMahan 901-2).

It is thus no surprise to find that two core notions of this new Japanese Buddhism resonate with ideas in Fenollosa’s early works. Firstly, what is central to the argument of New Buddhism, namely the philosophy of empty inherent existence, rings familiar to the philosophical ideas Fenollosa acquired from the contemporary Tendai school of Buddhism in Japan. This resemblance makes perfect sense considering the fact that Fenollosa used to learn Japanese Buddhism from the Tendai abbot Sakura Keitoku, and that Fenollosa himself used to be a member of the Shingon Buddhism, a school of Tendai thought (Saussy 28; Saussy et al. 204). Fenollosa’s familiarity with Tendai ideas also forms an interesting tension with Fenollosa’s ideogrammatic aesthetics in “The Chinese Written Language”. As the Tendai methods view realities as provisional “dependent-arisings” with no absolute meaning, the central point is quickly exposed in Fenollosa’s notion of Chinese ideographs, for the reason that nature per se becomes a indefinable temporary existence if viewed from a Tendai perspective (Lavery 137).

Secondly and more substantially, what New Buddhism deems necessary for Euro-American thought, namely taking Far Eastern Buddhism as an effective remedy for the limits of Occidental philosophy seems also a reverberation of Fenollosa’s early argument that Oriental philosophy might become the spiritual savior of the Western world in modern crisis. In his “Remarks on Japanese Arts in General”, Fenollosa articulates his prescient ideas of such supplementary relationship between Far Eastern Buddhism and Continental philosophy. There he further illustrates this theory by predicting that Eastern Buddhism, if combined with Western thoughts, especially “Western Science, and the theory of Western Synthetic Logic”, may prove sufficient for a better expression of intellectual as well as rational needs (8). As Haun Saussy squarely points out, Fenollosa sometimes “wrote in ways that echo the ideas of his students Inoue and Okakura” (20). It is apparent that Fenollosa’s anticipation is further refined in works of his Japanese students, particularly those of the two Buddhist philosophers Inoue Enryō and Okakura Kakuzō.

Fenollosa’s prophecy is further enlarged upon by the resonating voice of his Japanese students. Inoue was among the first group of students studying philosophy under Fenollosa’s instructions in the Tokyo Imperial University. Later becoming a zealous reformer of Japanese Buddhism, he was also impelled by the anti-Buddhism Meiji environment to experiment with a renewed Japanese Buddhist school Fenollosa had depicted (Staggs 257). One can see that the reforming ideas of Inoue Enryō bear marked resemblance to Fenollosa’s philosophical prophecy in two main ways. First, Inoue’s 1887 pronouncement of Bukkyō katsuron joron, that is Preliminaries as the Revitalization of Buddhism, shows that he was aiming for a profound change to invigorate Buddhism, and that he aspired to get Japanese Buddhism out of superstition and into a modern religious category where, according to tradition, only Western philosophies are included. A recurrent argument in his writing, that Buddhism is “fundamentally in accord with science”, may also be seen as a more solid response to Fenollosa’s philosophical assumption (Josephson 144). The other resemblance reiterating Fenollosa’s early ideas, which he shares with Okakura Kakuzō, is his consciousness of cultural duty as a nationalist (MFA 72). This duty is to display Japanese cultural and philosophical superiority to the spiritually sterile modern westerners, to show that “Buddhism was the equal of Western philosophy, superior to Western religion” (Staggs 261), particularly in a time when the modernized Euro-American forces were ceaselessly showing their overwhelming political and economic edge over East Asia. It is of very little import whether Inoue, or Okakura, or any other Japanese Buddhists, sincerely believed in such superiority or not. They apparently took it as a cultural mission to explore, expound and promote the existence of such superiority. They were fully convinced of Fenollosa’s early prediction that Japanese ideals, many of which derived from philosophical ideals of China, would represent the essence of Far Eastern philosophy to “conquer the world by the sword of the spirit” in modernization (CJT 145-51).

One point needs to be clarified here. It is true that every time Fenollosa enunciates his idea of Asiatic philosophy as a spiritual remedy for the Occident, geographically he is referring to both Chinese and Japanese philosophy. Thus an explanation is apparently needed here to explain why this section appears to have included only the discussion of Japanese philosophical ideals, but excluded that of Chinese ones. One only has to turn to Fenollosa’s essay “Chinese Ideals” written in 1900 to understand that the Chinese aspect of fact has not been deliberately thrown into oblivion, but has been largely represented in the modern time by new developments of Japanese philosophy. That Japanese philosophy inherits the best of traditional East Asian ideals is, if not a truth universally acknowledged, the exact prerequisite Fenollosa has in mind when writing about Far Eastern philosophy, as he identifies the Japanese as the most notable followers of the distinguished Chinese ideals which originated from a time earlier than the Confucius. While he sees in China only an impotent decadence paling in comparison with the modernizing efforts of Japanese philosophy, Fenollosa feels that the only way to depict the modern hope of Far Eastern philosophy is “to illustrate by Japanese examples what must be regarded in their continental range as essentially Chinese ideals” (CI 171).

All in all, valued as an exemplary philosophy generated in the modernizing environment of East Asia, the new genre of Japanese Buddhism served as a barometer of the self-transforming trends in Buddhist modernism, and an innovative Oriental solution to the dilemmas of philosophical conventions in the West. Its development also echoed Fenollosa’s early proposal of preserving Asiatic ideals in a renewed modern version, and his idea was enriched, cultivated and practiced by his students in fulfillment of another East Asian cultural duty -- providing philosophical solution for the arising spiritual dilemmas in the modern era.

Chapter Two Political Positions of China and Japan

in Modern Development

It is gradually known that Ezra Pound, in his reedited version of Fenollosa’s essay on Chinese written language, had made a few deletions and alterations before publication. The most obvious part was his removal of Fenollosa’s early discussions on contemporary Asian politics. As a matter of fact, Pound himself candidly admitted that he was taking “what seemed . . . most needed” (“Retrospect” 174) to bring out the poetic manifesto in the most possibly undisturbed way. Those removed paragraphs, if kept in their original place, may have now aroused the same scholarly interest as the remaining texts.

Just as Joseph Lavery encapsulates how the “Poundified Fenollosa” has made Pound’s and Fenollosa’s ideas indistinguishable in modernist studies, it is also a reasonable assumption that Pound’s omission of Fenollosa’s discussion has been one of the reasons why Fenollosa studies rarely delve into Far-Eastern political topics (135). In this case, it is helpful to examine Fenollosa’s comments on modern East Asian political affairs in the context of modernity and modernism.

2.1 Harbinger of War Crisis

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