ìwriting outside of languageîí.^35 Earlier in Fivemiletown, Paulin
playfully entitled one of his poems ëRosetta Stoneí.^36 Discovered in
1799, the Rosetta Stone was not without itís disappointments. In his
Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm (1890), Friedrich Schlegel
registered uneasiness about this new method of decoding the wisdom
of the ancients. Schlegel was enthusiastic about reading Eastern texts
closed to Western thought yet also dissatisfied by what they are
revealed by FranÁois Champollion to say.^37 Schlegel looked to a
symbolic representation or another text beneath the hieroglyphics.
Once deciphered, the hieroglyphic turns out to be like any other
known writing, its messages no deeper than any other text. Even so,
hieroglyphics are unusual since due to their mimetic qualities they
present an example where word and meaning are one. In this way they
are more symbolic than any other language system. It is impossible to
wholly decipher their meaning at a linguistic level since their function
is pictorial rather than audible. They may be seen but not heard. In this
case, hieroglyphic representation relies on the visual rather than on the
audible and there remains an excess that cannot be translated.
Ernest Fenollosaís unfinished essay, The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry (1936) edited by Ezra Pound,
celebrates Chinese as it offers a more visual sign system or language,
and this compares with the hieroglyph. The Imagism of Pound and the
fascist politics of the Second World War are a ghostly presence in
Walking a Line. In ëThe Ivy Restaurantí where Ford Madox Ford once
had a ëliterary lunchí, the speaker dines on the sickening influence of
ëles Imagistesí which may be enough ëto make you squirmí (p.82).
The early modernist context of Imagism was concerned with making
language more vivid. Fenollosa argues:
35 Maurice Blanchot, ëThe Absence of the Bookí, LíEntretien infini (1969),
translated in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Essays, trans. Lydia David
(Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press, 1981), p.146. p.103. Cf. Crone &
Koerner, p.65.
36 Tom Paulin, Fivemiletown, p.19.
37 Friedrich Schlegel, Letter of April 27, 1825, Briefe an seinen Bruder August
Wilhelm, ed., Oskar F. Walzel (Berlin: Speyer and Peters, 1890), p.623. Cf.
Crone & Koerner, vii.