12.6: Subjective Experience of Chinese Versus English
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Hieroglyphs are one thing, Demotic Egyptian another. The first bears units of language that actually look like pictures (even if they are not pictograms), the second, as a hieroglyphic descendant bears only traces of those pictures. Demotic is a simplified cursive script, and unless one was trained by looking at Demotic and Egyptian side-by-side (perhaps looking, e.g. at trilingual inscriptions), and taught the relationships between words, it is doubtful that the common scribe would actively be able to see the original hieroglyph behind the Demotic scrawl. But even if the original ‘pictures’ have become so simplified that they disappear, does some element of visuality remain? I would like to argue that it does, and to do so, I will turn to the ‘abstract art’ of Chinese writing.
Although Chinese writing — which first appears around the 14th century BCE in what is now Anyang, Henan Province (Shizheng 2008) — evolved far from its original hieroglyphs (like Demotic), its signs are still often considered representations as though these signs were ‘capturing’ an original image and expressing that image in an abstract form. So write the curators of the recent 2006 Metropolitan Museum exhibition on Chinese writing titled ‘Brush and Ink’:
In China, calligraphy, ‘the art of writing’, is regarded as the quintessential visual art, ranking above painting as the most important vehicle for individual expression. As such, calligraphy may be appreciated in much the same way as some abstract art — by following the artist’s every gesture, re-experiencing the kinesthetic action of creation as preserved in the inked lines. This installation will trace the 1,600-year history of brush writing from its genesis as a fine art in the 4th century A.D....to its recent transformation...into a form of abstract art (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2006).
To what extent can alphabetic writing be considered an ‘abstract art’? I do not mean to what extent can alphabetic writing be used within abstract art, as for example, American artist Cy Twombly does. I mean the writing itself being viewed not as a ‘spelling out’ of the word but somehow an abstract representation of the word. One would be hard-pressed to find testimony of alphabetic ‘representation’, but it is precisely this idea of abstract representation versus ‘spelling out’ which frequently occurs in the Chinese-English testimonia.
Whether it is a native Chinese speaker who learned English or vice versa, the Chinese language assumes a certain artistic, aesthetic or even spiritual primacy over English — not for how the language sounds, but for how it is written. What is most interesting is that this primacy is rarely articulated in any objective way, i.e. “Chinese script is a more aesthetic/spiritual style of writing because of x, y, and z” but rather the testimonial often take recourse to metaphor as though the writer cannot quite grasp why one language/script is loftier than the other. There is good reason for this: quite simply one language/script is not loftier than the other. Both languages (English and Chinese, or Greek and Egyptian), when isolated from each other carry out the same mundane functions of daily transaction. But once in contact with each other, (creative) comparisons arise of how it ‘feels’ to write or read the script of one language rather than the other.
Take, for example, the English poet Ezra Pound. Learning an alphabetic script first and only later learning a logographic one, Pound describes the logographic language in almost mystical terms — not for how it sounds, not for its spoken grammar, but for how it is written. For Pound, in the ABC of Reading , the Chinese language consists of pictures based on sight, not sound (Pound 1951: 20), which certain people do not need to learn but can immediately recognize: “the Chinese ideogram is based on something everyone knows” (Pound 1951: 22). It is the ultimate language of poetry, because instead of defining, e.g. the term ‘red’ through increasing logical abstractions (e.g. ‘color’, ‘hue’, ‘spectrum’), it “puts together abbreviated pictures of a rose, a cherry, iron rust, a flamingo”. Pound’s ideas in this book are largely derived from Ernest Fenollosa’s Essay on the Chinese Written Character to which Pound ascribes a profound importance. Fenollosa also soars to lofty heights in describing the potential of the Chinese character’s visuality: “...Chinese notation is something very much more than...arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid short-hand picture of the operations of nature” (Fenollosa and Pound 2008: 80). While the spoken word depends on “sheer convention”, the Chinese method proceeds upon “natural suggestion”. The objectivity of Pound’s and Fenollosa’s discussions of Chinese — as though it were a language beyond grammar and derived from nature itself — naturally comes under fierce criticism from those with a better understanding of the language (cf. Kennedy 1958). But the point I want to highlight here is the extent to which the written aspect of the language — which Pound and Fenollosa consider visual due to its non-alphabetic nature — is exalted, to even mystical, spiritual heights.
This spirituality of written Chinese is found in many books on the Chinese character. Rose Quong for example, writes “Chinese written characters reveal the thought process of the Chinese mind and of the universal mind, as well... They have universal appeal because most of these
characters were originally pictures” (Quong 1973: 9). The causal reason here for the “universality” of the Chinese character is its connection to originally pictographic hieroglyphs (which is something it shares with Demotic). Quong’s discussion of the “life-movement” (1973: 9) of the Chinese brush, again, I would argue is nothing objective, but a very particularly articulated subjective experience of comparing two forms of writing — alphabetic and logographic. Diane Wolff (1974: 9) describes the script similarly: “If one understands how Chinese characters are constructed, he can see them better, and see, too, the unceasing poetry of the language to its very roots” and “a Chinese word is really a piece of visual architecture, like a painting, a photomontage, or a collage” (Wolff 1974: 18). If we consider these attitudes from the converse perspective — that is, rather than a native practitioner of an alphabetic language learning logographic script, but vice versa — similar sentiments can be found. Chiang Yee, in his book on Chinese Calligraphy writes that “a Chinese man examining Western calligraphy from the Magna Carta to Bacchylides [will see that it is] elegant but lacking in variety because of the restricted nature of alphabetic forms” (Chiang 1954: 3). To the Chinese or logographic eye, European or alphabetic languages are just “a collection of lifeless letters” (1954: 4) while “a good Chinese character is an artistic thought” (1954: 14) with “each ideogram throwing on the mind an isolated picture...while European words contain no visual ideas”. And finally “Chinese is in nature and origin entirely different from any other language. It is perhaps the only pure language in the world”. Whether it is West describing East or East describing West, similar sentiments are attested: an exaltation of the logographic over the alphabetic.
Although the grammars of Egyptian and Chinese are very different, there is little need to discuss these differences here since my aim is to explore but one aspect of writing practice as experience — that of the alphabetic script versus the logographic one. The question that remains is whether a Greco-Egyptian could have held similar perceptions. Although there is no firm evidence for Demotic ‘calligraphy’ as is attested for the earlier Egyptian hieratic script, trilingual Greco- Egyptian inscriptions — which bear a relief at the top, hieroglyphs at the second tier, Demotic on the third, and Greek on the fourth — suggest a certain hierarchy as well as a sliding scale of visuality. Perhaps, Greek too, in comparison with Demotic was perceived to be ‘just a collection of lifeless letters’. The contact of logographic and alphabetic scripts forces comparison and hierarchy: the varied perceptions of scripts, as well as that sliding scale of visuality, seem just as applicable to Greek and Egyptian as English and Chinese.