[and she] fell [in the] foss.” The ru of “trudging” reappears chiastically in
“lurching” and “Curraghman,” and “us” in “used” reappears in “rustle.”
In his study Ideograma: Lógica/Poesia/Linguagem (only a section of which
has been translated into English),^19 Haroldo discusses Ernest Fenollosa’s study
of the Chinese written character. Unlike Pound, who took Fenollosa at face
value, Haroldo recognizes that the sinologist’s notion that in Chinese words
are much closer to things than in English, that there is a natural connection
between the ideogram and what it represents, is incorrect. Rather, using
Roman Jakobson and Charles Peirce’s theories of semantic and syntactic
motivation, Haroldo argues that Fenollosa’s argument must be understood
somewhat differently:
Since... at a second level, poetry “naturalizes” (rei¤es) the sign by
virtue of its “self-re®ecting” function and the emphasis on the mate-
riality of the message.... Fenollosa’s genetic parti pris, highlighted by
his “magic realism,” loses in importance to the formal (intrinsic) per-
tinence of the description. At this point the Peircean notion of dia-
gram makes it possible to transfer (“translate”) the Fenollosian (and
Poundian) conception of the ideogram and the ideogrammic method
of composing (relational, parallelistic, paratactic syntax) to the sphere
(where the palpable side of the sign comes to the fore), wherein Saus-
sure (the Saussure of anagrams as “asyndetic successions” of para-
digms) and Jakobson (above all the Jakobson of the poetry of gram-
mar) are privileged mediators. (Dispositio 14)For Haroldo, in other words, the interest of the ideogram is not in its status
as a visual sign that stands for a particular meaning; rather, the ideogram
brings to our attention the “palpable side of the sign” in its “relational, paral-
lelistic, paratactic syntax.” Relationality becomes the key term, and the units
to be related are phonemes and morphemes as well as words and phrases.
From this perspective, Concrete poetry is less a matter of spatial form and
typographic device than of “ideogrammatizing” the verbal units themselves.
The ru/ur constellation in “and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad
of a Curraghman,” with its punning on “lie” and “broad”—these are items
that must be seen. But—and this has been the role the Wa k e obviously played
for Haroldo and the other Concretists—the ideogrammic method, recon-
ceived as it is in Haroldo’s study, can be used in “prose” quite as easily as in
verse or in the spatial constellation characteristic of the Concrete poem.
Now we are in a better position to understand the following statement in
Haroldo’s 1977 essay “Sanscreed Latinized”:
182 Chapter 9