| Existing somewhere between images and material objects, ideograms---written signs---embody ideas, not sounds as in an alphabet. In the early 20 th century, the semi-pictographic figures of Chinese ideographs and their synthetic forms of composition attracted the attention of more than a few Modernist poets and writers. This study concerns three Modernist writers, two Anglo-American and one Japanese, Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), Ezra Pound (1885-1972), and Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), and argues that their ideogrammic theories of composition transformed Modernist conceptions of textual space. In particular, this research examines their tropes of textual organicism, which I define as a sense of textual entities as autonomous, equating an artwork to an organism and seeking the creation of holistic harmony and totality within the artwork itself. The close alliance between the figures of a body and a text in these writers' works means that their theories of composition can be contextualized in both Eastern and Western literary traditions: the Japanese organic conception of language as buntai (literally, sentence + body) and the Western discourses of social and aesthetic organicism. The transforming figures of textual organicism demonstrate a paradigmatic shift of spatio-temporal perception from Romanticism to Modernism, driven by Eastern and Western textual interactions.;Three distinct metaphors represent these writers' arts of ideogrammic composition: Fenollosa's line system, Pound's machine organum, and Yokomitsu's view of the nationalist/capitalist mechanism as chimerical monstrosity. These organicist metaphors exhibit an ingrained urge for totality and, therefore, inevitably locate the intersection of their aesthetic search for ideogrammic totality in relation to particular political discourses (such as Hegelian cosmopolitanism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese Nationalism). While foregrounding the aesthetic and political tensions in the Modernists' efforts to reorganize textual, conceptual, and social space, this study highlights their aesthetic resistance: the ideogrammic pleasure in articulation; the potential for interactive communication via image, visual figuration, and bodies; and the synesthetic experience of wholeness in life. Ultimately, I propose the Modernist ideogram as an emblem of these writers' compositions, reclaiming their own textual and physical presence against the fragmentation and the incomprehensibility of the modern period. |
