Jacob Edmond
By attending to modernist works that radically foreground copying and by recognizing similarly repetitive structures even in works that seek to resist sameness through strangeness, we can complicate the opposition between mass reproduction, consumer capitalism, and globalization, on the one hand, and modernist aestheticism, on the other.
“Make it new.” The original, the foreign, the idiolectic—modernism has been told as a story of novelty, strangeness, and singular genius. And this story has been given new inflection as scholars have sought to emphasize the variety and global reach of modernisms in the plural. Yet “make it the same” might equally serve as the catchphrase of modernism. Modernism emerged out of a vast increase in copying, to which it responded through repetition, appropriation, and remixing, from Eisenstein’s montage, Duchamp’s readymades, Stein’s repetitions as insistences, Picasso’s and Braque’s collage, Joyce’s pastiche, Melville’s Bartleby, Borges’s Menard, and Burroughs’s and Gysin’s cut-ups to Xu Zhimo’s translations and versioning, Gandhi’s printing press, Sergei Tretyakov’s newspaper as twentieth-century epic, and Kamau Brathwaite’s audio and computer-graphic remediation and self-rewriting.1 Even the slogan status of Pound’s phrase “make it new” is the product of later critical appropriations, and the phrase itself is a translation, a copy of a centuries-old text that was probably mistranscribed from a far more ancient source (North, Novelty, 162–171; Shaughnessy, Sources of Western Zhou History, 7). The copy’s centrality to modernism is increasingly legible in the early twenty-first century, when reproduction triumphs over production in the billions of everyday acts through which we produce and consume links and likes on Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, and other social media.
But the copy is hardly new. Oral poetry was and is built on repetitions of plots, rhymes, and stock phrases. Manuscript culture produced individualistic acts of repetition, variation, and remixing. Copying and annotation are central to many traditions, from Chinese literature and philosophy to biblical hermeneutics. Medieval poetry in Europe and East Asia depended on repeated forms and conventions, and early modern theater in England developed through competitive copying and versioning of plays, plots, and characters. At a more basic level, copying is fundamental to the acquisition and use of language.
Despite copying’s ubiquity, what counts as a copy and the pace and intensity of copying have changed in response to technologies, from writing, print, and audio recording to digital computing, and as a result of new transportation and communication linkages and the institutions of trade and empire that have increased the adoption and adaptation of cultural material from afar. The copy, as I will refer to it here, is both a literary device and a conceptual framework through which to rethink global modernism: an artistic strategy encompassing such techniques as pastiche, stylization, cut-and-paste, collage, montage, remediation, performance, translation, and the appropriation of form, plot, theme, titles, and the like; and a technological, economic, and geopolitical context in which copying becomes a cultural dominant.
Modernism has often been seen as a site of resistance to the emergence of the copy as a cultural dominant. The emphasis in Anglo-American modernism on making it new has been influentially read as deriving from the need “to produce something which resists and breaks through the force of gravity of repetition as a universal feature of commodity equivalence” (Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 136). Yet by attending to modernist works that radically foreground copying and by recognizing similarly repetitive structures even in works that seek to resist sameness through strangeness, we can complicate the opposition between mass reproduction, consumer capitalism, and globalization, on the one hand, and modernist aestheticism, on the other. The copy thereby provides a way to negotiate the ongoing rift between readings of modernism—and between parts of modernist practice—that emphasize sociological, technological, political, and economic context and those that stress the particularity and singular genius of modernist works.
The copy—more than its apparent cousins, influence, imitation, mimesis, adaptation, and translation—also offers a means to question global modernism’s temporal and spatial hierarchies. These hierarchies emerge from what Rey Chow has termed a “mimetic desire, responsive and oriented toward the West’s imposition of itself on the Rest” (The Age of the World Target, 83). Understood in these terms, to write of non-Western, peripheral, or global modernism is to articulate this mimetic desire “to speak in the other’s language in order to be recognized by the other” that is the West. Within the “make it new” rhetoric of modernism, mimetic desire “imposes a historical lag between the other’s behavior and one’s own. To be caught up in mimetic desire requires one invariably to be ‘behind the times’” (Hayot, “Chinese Modernism,” 157). The copy, by contrast, does not “privilege being temporally ‘first’” (162). Hence the “strategy of re-writing” not only attempts, as in some avant-garde practice, “to short-circuit or interrupt the text’s own representational construction” (Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde, 263, 293); it also undoes the structure of mimetic desire that shapes the way we think modernism transnationally. Just as the “anti-theatrical” theater of Brecht and other modernists was a means of “keeping under control and mediating the theatrical mimesis” (Puchner, Stage Fright, 25), so copy works to denaturalize the framework of originality, innovation, and mimetic desire in approaches to global modernism.
The Same News Throughout the World
To think global modernism through the copy is to highlight the various technological, geopolitical, and historical materialisms that have reinvigorated modernist studies and especially to draw together two still arguably “separate and non-communicative” approaches: on the one hand, a focus on new technologies of reproduction and communication; on the other, transnationalism (Collier, “Imperial/Modernist Forms,” 487).2 Read in this vein, for example, Joyce’s Ulysses adopts the newspaper’s collage effect and global reach not just in the “Aeolus” episode but also, for instance, where an advertisement in a newspaper used for butcher wrapping shifts Bloom’s thoughts suddenly to Zionist settlements in Palestine. Read similarly, the conclusion to the “Oxen of the Sun” episode responds to the rise of global English by developing a dialect of modernism founded on racial mimicry while also asserting the public domain of speech in response to the expansion of international copyright (North, The Dialect of Modernism, 32; Saint-Amour, The Copywrights, 184–185).
But to focus on the copy is equally to recognize the problem with such global perspectives, which reduce individual texts to examples of larger phenomena through “the magic of mimesis wherein the replication, the copy, acquires the power of the represented” (Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 16). Charles Altieri criticizes the new modernist studies for seeing copies everywhere, for adopting an “analogical model” that “stresses only similarities.” Altieri invites us to consider “the difference between showing how Henry James’s work shares some characteristics with the telegraph, and showing how James thought about working out ways to have his style take on telegraphic properties,” as the difference between analogy and “a dialectical account of how those purposive actions worked through specific and general problems” (“After word,” 778). In seeking to emphasize larger historical, technological, and geopolitical forces and contexts such as those I have invoked here, scholars of global modernism risk underplaying the poetics and materiality of modernist texts and modernists’ active engagements with and responses to new technologies, media, and globalization. Yet analogical thinking—what Walter Benjamin called the “historical hallucination of sameness” (Selected Writings, 208)—is also a central theme of modernism, fed by the rise of the commodity economy and new technologies, such as telegraphy, that enabled copies to be propagated rapidly around the world. Addressing the poetics of the copy provides a way to bridge the divide between modernist text and context by calling attention to the iterative devices through which modernists respond to and reconfigure the larger rise of copying culture in modernity, including the intertwining of the copy with imaginings of the global.
Paul-Louis Couchoud exemplifies such intertwined imaginings of new media, cross-cultural appropriation, and globalization in his conflation of modern media’s capacity to copy, the Western tradition of imagining East Asian cultures as inherently imitative, and Euro-American modernism’s tendency to find in East Asia a distorted copy of the West and hence a “privileged site for witnessing the increasingly global character of a modernity” (Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 114; Bush, “Modernism, Orientalism, and East Asia,” 196). Couchoud was instrumental in introducing the haiku to Europe, and he explained his promotion of the Japanese form by citing new global convergences wrought by technologies of reproduction and communication, “the telegraph, the daily paper and the cinematograph,” through which the “same news is known . . . throughout the world” (Japanese Impressions, 9–10). For Couchoud, this “same news”—combined with the West’s shock at Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1904–1905, broadcast around the world by telegraph—also resulted in a new recognition of cultural iteration. Any “problem . . . on one side of the planet” could now be seen to have “repeated itself, in essence, on the other side” (11). The haiku form not only spread worldwide thanks to the copying potential of new technologies and media but also embodied the increased speed of global communication through a “rapid impression” that “instantly strikes us” (38). Couchoud’s haiku is, then, the perfect form for the world of global linkup that Lamartine had anticipated as early as 1831 when he wrote that through the newspaper, “Thought will spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light: instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood, at the extremities of the earth” (“The Polity of Reason,” 68–69). And indeed Couchoud reports that it is “the journalists who write the haikai. The war with Russia brought forth hundreds of them” (Japanese Impressions, 38).
Couchoud’s imagining of global repetition through new media, the rise of a non-Western great power, and a traditional Japanese poetic form is repeated, through the intermediary of F. S. Flint, in Ezra Pound’s better-known mimicry of haiku poetry (Carr, “Imagism and Empire,” 70–72, 80). Pound inaugurated imagism as a poetry of the “instant,” which “instantaneously” conveys a “sense of freedom from time limits and space limits,” precisely the qualities of rapidity and spatial transcendence through which Couchoud linked the haiku form to the telegraph and the newspaper (Pound, “A Few Don’ts,” 200). Like Couchoud, Pound also implicitly connected the minimalism of the haiku to the minimalism required for the telegraphic journalism of war reporting, criticizing in his imagist manifesto a “Turkish war correspondent” for using “ornament” (202). The haiku as both a non-Western traditional form and the form of modern media and globalization matched Pound’s own oxymoronic desire to make “news that STAYS news,” to make copy that would be perpetually copied (Pound, ABC of Reading, 29).
As it was first published, Pound’s most famous haiku-like poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” typographically isolates the colon and period:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough .
Here, the punctuation marks appear almost as separate words and so invite the reader to sound them out as in a telegraph: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd colon / Petals on a wet, black bough stop.” In support of this unorthodox reading, one might note Pound’s interest in rhythmic signaling systems, as evidenced by his later writing on the Balunda “drum telegraph” (Golston, Rhythm and Race, 85) and by the way Pound’s “METRO Hokku” employs a form of juxtaposition similar to what Marinetti had a year earlier named “wireless imagination” (l’immaginazione senza fili), alluding to the recently invented “wireless telegraph” (telegrafo senza fili). Pound’s poem also suggests the short dots and long dashes of Morse code through the single and double dots of the isolated period and colon and through the rhythmic repetitions and variations of the text, in which the prosodic echo between the title and first line runs in counterpoint to the equation, signaled by the colon, between the two lines of the poem proper, which are rhythmically contrasted.
To claim that Pound’s poem resembles a telegram might seem to actualize Altieri’s hypothetical example of how “the ‘New Modernist Studies’ fails the old modernism” and to ignore willfully Pound’s own railing against “similarity or analogy . . . likeness or mimicry,” especially “the copying or imitating” that he associates with new technologies such as the cinematograph (Pound, “Vortex,” 154; Pound, “Vorticism”). Yet attention to the intertwined levels of copy poetics at work in Pound’s poem tells a different story, allowing one to see how the poem is “at once photographic and antiphotographic,” how it both mimics and responds to the pressures of new technologies and globalization in its imaginary traversal of spatial and cultural divides (Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 65). The global vision is reinforced in the poem’s original publication context by Harriet Monroe’s editorial on Tagore, which calls for a break with Anglo-American provinciality in the face of the “bigness of the world” (“Editorial Comment,” 25), and by the final line of the immediately preceding poem, “Let there be commerce between us” (Pound, “A Pact,” 12). Although referring to Pound and Whitman, the line in this context underscores the dependence of Pound’s haiku-imagist poem on East/West commerce and on the parallel between a Western modernist’s appropriation of a Japanese form and the poem’s two juxtaposed lines. The poem conveys a sense of encoding, equation, and translation—as in the process of telegraphy—through the colon, through the teleportation of a form from Japanese to English, through the juxtaposition of urban modernity and rural image, Paris and East Asia, and through its aural and syntactic repetitions.
But Pound also puts pressure on such assertions of sameness and instant connectivity, undoing their certainties through further acts of repetition. Pound signals his refusal of exact equivalence, encoding, and copying by replacing the colon with a semicolon and regularizing the layout in later printings of the poem, so eliminating the explicit equation between the poem’s two lines and the telegraphic voicing of the punctuation.3 Recognizing this change, of course, requires attention to the poem’s multiple material embodiments, its many copies—the contrast, in particular, between the poem’s initial publication in Poetry and later versions. Pound himself famously stressed the process of versioning, rewriting, and telegraphic condensation, describing how the poem emerged out of two much longer poems of “second intensity,” thereby claiming “In a Station of the Metro” as both an essence and a copy (Pound, “Vorticism”). Pound’s poem works dialectically between a global vision of the copy and an enfolding of the copy, photography, telegraphy, and the adopted set form of the Japanese haiku into an assertion of singularity. Reading Pound’s poem through the copy illustrates how globalization and new technologies of reproduction and communication shape the dialectic between originality and mere repetition in modernism. Engendered by the rise of the copy as a cultural dominant, this dialectic also helps explain modernist historiography’s ongoing division between, at its crudest, sui generis singularity and technological or economic determinism.
Taking the copy as a central device and problematic of modernism also extends modernism’s historical range by deprivileging being temporally first and so revaluing later copy works that respond to a new wave of globalization and copy-enabling technologies. For example, in 1997, the Chinese poet Yang Lian remediated the layered repetitions of his poem Dahai tingzhi zhi chu 大海停止之处 (Where the sea stands still) into a HyperCard and HTML collaboration with the Anglo-Canadian poet-programmer John Cayley. Using Cayley’s theory of digital poetics—itself developed in dialogue with classical Chinese poetry and Poundian poetics—Yang later cited their collaboration in arguing that Chinese writing was particularly suited to computer-based poetry, thereby appropriating Western modernism’s approach to new media through the so-called Chinese ideograph. Many other late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poetic works foreground copying and repetition, as in Yi Sha’s idiosyncratic and irreverent translations of poems from world literature and the Chinese tradition, which are rapidly disseminated online, provoking the ire of traditionalists (Inwood, “Yi Sha,” 9); Kenneth Goldsmith’s transcriptions of traffic and weather reports and an entire issue of the New York Times; and Hsia Yü’s newspaper page cross-outs (Hsia Yü et al., “Cross It Out”).
Perhaps the most prolific of all recent exponents of copy works, the Russian poet and artist Dmitri Prigov produced a series, entitled Telegrammy (Telegrams), that reiterates the telegraphic imagination of the early twentieth century while comically taking Pound’s vision of imagist condensation to absurdist extremes, as in the telegram in his series attributed to Dostoevsky: “STUDENT COMMA KILLED OLD WOMAN COMMA WITH AXE COMMA ANGUISHES TERRIBLY STOP” (СТУДЕНТ ЗПТ УБИЛ СТАРУХУ ЗПТ ТОПОРОМ ЗПТ МУЧИТСЯ УЖАСНО ТЧК; Prigov, untitled artist’s book, n.p.). Prigov’s condensation of the essence of Crime and Punishment is just one in a series that includes pieces attributed to Tchaikovsky (“EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMA CRISIS COMMA . . . STOP TRAGIC FINALE STOP”), Pushkin (“UNCLE COMMA SICK STOP”), Stalin, and the Voice of America (untitled artist’s book, n.p.; Grazhdane!, 230–233). In his Telegrams, Prigov satirizes modernism’s overturning of the nineteenth-century classics through an insistence on telegraphic compression while also connecting these Russian classics to the ideology of the Soviet state (and its Cold War enemy) as represented by the officially regulated medium of the telegram. Yet by uniting an official medium and officially sanctioned great artists with the samizdat medium of typescript pasted onto art-quality paper, Prigov also targets the cultural mythologies of the samizdat text, according to which each scrap of semilegible, laboriously copied typescript on poor-quality paper contained treasured words of repressed expression.
Prigov produced his Telegrams in the late 1970s and early 1980s, around the time that he began using the term “conceptual” to refer to his work. The Russian theorist Boris Groys had first brought the term to prominence in the samizdat literary community in a 1977 essay in which he introduced British and American conceptual art via Borges’s fictional copyist hero Pierre Menard, who reproduces Don Quixote “word for word” but whose copying of Cervantes produces a text “almost infinitely richer” than the original (Ficciones, 49, 52). Borges’s story highlights how even an exact copy differs over time and between contexts and media: the narrator perceives the “traces” of the “handwriting of our friend,” Menard, within the “final,” printed Don Quixote (54). Just a few years before Borges wrote his story, Mikhail Bakhtin had named this process of continuous change “re-accentuation” and made it central to his account of discourse in the novel (The Dialogic Imagination, 421–422). Groys’s act of copying and recombination—remixing Borges and conceptual art—continues this process of reaccentuation and in turn inspired further acts of copying, versioning, and remediation, such as Prigov’s Telegrams and his many repetitions and versionings of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Such acts of explicit copying reflect on the processes of repetition that characterize canonization and cross-cultural appropriation, as in Prigov’s reframing of Menard’s strategy as a way to comment on Russian nationalism, romanticism, and samizdat culture and as part of his presentation of Russian conceptualism as more conceptual than Western conceptualism (Prigov, “Conceptualism and the West”).
Menard returns as the prototype for the rise of conceptual writing in the English-speaking world (especially in Canada and the United States) in the 2000s (Dworkin, “Fate of Echo,” xlv). These conceptualists make Menard’s poetics of echo central to a retrospectively generated canon of modernist conceptual writing that includes such works as Yeats’s “Mona Lisa,” a transcription of a passage from Walter H. Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance lineated into free verse by Yeats and used to open the Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892–1935 (Dworkin and Goldsmith, Against Expression, 576–577). Such uses of Menard affirm how Borges’s “text already inscribes within itself, intimately and unavoidably, the analytic and epistemic protocols for its discursive and narrative permutation into the theoretical complexity of the critical field called world literature” (Kadir, “World Literature,” 300–301). Where Djelal Kadir here offers Borges’s story as an antidote to fungible world literature, however, Menard and his travels indicate a more complex playing with fungibility and the uniqueness of each instantiation of even the same text.
The dialectic between the generalizing claims of the copy—finding the same everywhere—and the unique materiality of each instantiation inheres in modernism’s use of the copy to respond to media and globalization and in attempts to read modernism as a response to these forces while recognizing the particularity of each iteration. Even the most exact repetition contains differences. These differences undo the artificial separation of a repeated text or object from its context or medium of iteration, highlighting the contingent nature of language and culture, text and media, which are not clearly defined objects but intertwined “social experiences of meaning,” “nodes of articulation along a signifying chain” (Gitelman, Always Already New, 148; Dworkin, No Medium, 32). To address modernism through the copy means confronting the relation of the global conceived as a generalizable series of copies to the “ideology of disembodiment,” “transcendental data,” and translatability that dominates today’s digital imaginary but which is already recognizable in Couchoud’s vision of the “same news . . . throughout the world” (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 192; Liu, Local Transcendence, 211–236; Pressman, “Reading the Code”).
Varieties of Sameness
“In today’s divided world, to discover varieties of sameness is to give in too easily to the false promises of a level playing field,” writes Gayatri Spivak (“Rethinking Comparativism,” 611). Yet to discover only differences is to give up the possibility of thinking relations between things. The dialectic of the copy not only illuminates this problem but also offers a possible methodological solution. If, as Spivak suggests, “we start from an assumption of linguistic equivalence, which rests on language’s capacity to inscribe,” then we should recognize that to inscribe is also to copy, to iterate (614–615).
Language’s iterability offers grounds for comparison and a way to find commonality between the two major competing models for thinking modernism on a global scale. The copy is at the heart of the influential account of global modernism associated with Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova, who draw on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory in order to explain modern literary history as the product of a world that is “one, and unequal” (Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 56). As Moretti emphasizes, this model is explicitly focused on accounting for the production of “sameness” through the “diffusion” of cultural forms from the global economic and geopolitical “core” to the “periphery” (Moretti, “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur,” 114–115). Moretti’s prescription for “distant reading” is the tracking of copies (through the wavelike propagation of the novel form, for example) across space and time (Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 56–58). Such accounts emphasize the sameness of the copy as the formal representation of cultural hegemony.4 But even more influential have been studies that stress the changes texts undergo as they move—through copies, translations, and versioning—beyond “their culture of origin” (Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4) and related counterhegemonic accounts that highlight diasporic circulation in “transnational contexts marked by difference” and the proliferation of “hybrid” and “translocal poetics” as copies are produced, circulated, and reframed in new contexts (Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 7; Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, xii–xiii). Despite stressing difference rather than sameness, this alternative model of cultural “circulations” shares with world-systems theory an attempt to account for and address forms of iteration.5 The contrasting readings of iteration as either a source of creative adaptation or slavish imitation reflect the tension between making it new and mimetic desire in global modernism.
Modernist copy works suggest an alternative to both paradigms for thinking global modernism. They treat dissemination and circulation neither as merely a system of domination imposed on the periphery by the center nor through a generalized counterhegemonic account of hybridity or translocalism. Instead, copy works suggest a fundamental upheaval in the value system of originality and mimetic desire upon which both accounts of global modernism are built.
Take, for example, Lu Xun’s foundational work of Chinese modernism and modern vernacular Chinese literature “Kuangren riji” 狂人日记 (Diary of a madman). Lu Xun’s short story echoes and reframes Gogol’s “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (Diary of a madman), which is in turn indebted to Cervantes (Tambling, Madmen and Other Survivors, 29–30). One might treat these instances of appropriation as examples of how writers on the peripheries or semiperipheries of China and Russia responded to Western Europe’s hegemonic status in nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity. Or one could take the example to be a case of global circulation that undermines such center-periphery accounts by illustrating the networks of linkage and affiliation whereby so-called peripheral literatures communicate with one another rather than only with the center. In doing so, one would undoubtedly also stress the transformative ways in which Cervantes’s talking dogs become Gogol’s and then Lu Xun’s literary pets. In one reading, we emphasize the mimetic desire for recognition on the center’s terms. In the other, we acknowledge the creative adaptations through which globalization undermines the center-periphery binary.
Read through the poetics of the copy, however, these texts, like Menard’s fictional copying of Cervantes, challenge the assumptions of originality and genius upon which both accounts are built. Although it could be read as an example of foreign imitation or creative adaptation, Lu Xun’s story is also specifically about copying and exact repetition. Attending to Lu Xun’s emphasis on repetition and reinscription clarifies what we might gain from rereading modernism through the copy.
Lu Xun’s and Gogol’s stories both describe the delirium of sameness, of finding exact copies everywhere, as in the discovery that “four thousand years” of Chinese history can be paraphrased in two words—“eat people”—or that “Spain and China are one and the same country” since if one writes “Spain on a piece of paper, it comes out as China” (Lu Xun, Lu Xun quan ji, 454; Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 211–212). The importance of the copy is itself suggested in the device of a story written from the perspective of a madman, a perspective that, as in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, interrogates the notion of mimesis by undermining the reader’s confidence in the text’s description of the world. Through the madman’s revelation that the practice of “eating people” has been repeated over thousands of years, Lu Xun connects uncertainty about mimesis to the act of copying. This endless copying is also performed through the related iterative device of repetition. The phrase “chi ren” 吃人 (eat people) is repeated no less than twenty-eight times in a story of fewer than five thousand characters (that is, over one percent of the text is made up of the words “eat people”). The iterated phrase enacts the madman’s discovery of a “whole book filled with two words—‘Eat people’!” (满本都写着两个字是“吃人”!; 447). Lu Xun further emphasizes copying and repetition by presenting the story as a partial copy made from a diary and, implicitly, as a remediation from manuscript to print. The editor-narrator claims to have “copied out a part to serve as a subject for medical research” (撮录一篇，以供医家研究; 444). The story is not only about an imagined unveiling of a vast history of cannibalism—and, allegorically, an attack on repressive and inhumane aspects of Chinese society—but itself suggests a modernist project that consumes foreign examples and turns them to new uses. Lu Xun consumes the body of Gogol’s text “Diary of a Madman” while also taking a bite out of Dead Souls’s focus on the inhuman institution of serfdom, which extends macabrely and absurdly in Gogol’s story to the ownership of the dead. Lu Xun’s story identifies such parasitism not just as the problem of China and Chinese history but also as a digestive model for Chinese modernism.
Lu Xun’s emphasis on copying through both the narrative frame and phrasal repetition gives a different inflection to readings of his appropriative practice. Whether we treat Lu Xun’s appropriation as an act of imitation or creative genius, we remain committed to originality and innovation as the terms of recognition within global modernism’s framework of mimetic desire. Yet Lu Xun’s stress on exact reproduction suggests another perspective. Just as Lu Xun’s madman undoes any sense of historical development or progress by maintaining that the same two characters are repeated unaltered across four thousand years, so attending to repetition, reproduction, and copying as modernist practices undoes the privileging of originality, origins, temporal priority, and progress in commonplace accounts of modernism. Lu Xun’s allegorical presentation of Chinese culture as entrapped and unchanging in contrast with the progress of Western modernity is turned on its head: Chinese repetition becomes the condition of modernity at large.
Contemporary scholarship on global modernism has attacked the tendency to approach Euro-American modernist appropriations by the likes of Pound as works of original genius while at the same time treating non-European or so-called peripheral modernisms as derivative or belated. Rather than simply reversing the direction of influence, however, copy works interrogate the underlying framework of mimetic desire. The question ceases to be, as Friedman wryly asks of Picasso’s and Van Gogh’s copies of African and Japanese art, “who . . . is derivative of whom?” (“Planetarity,” 484; similarly, Bush, “Modernism,” 201) and instead becomes: is derivativeness or originality the sole basis for thinking global modernism?
The anxiety central to East Asian modernism about copying Western models and about copying, rather than escaping, tradition can be considered not just as a response to Western hegemony but as part of a general anxiety about the copy, new media, and globalization, an anxiety equally present in the appropriative poetics of Pound or Joyce. One can thus address the worry that reading a work such as Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” as “modernist” reduces twentieth-century Chinese literature to “a diluted story about repetition” not by insisting on its innovations but by recognizing the centrality of the copy to modernism in toto (Tang, “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman,’” 1,222–1,223).
The copy not only highlights overtly iterative practices but also offers a way to rethink a much broader range of modernist work. I have tried to suggest these broader implications by singling out, in Pound’s poem and Lu Xun’s short story, modernist texts that are not obviously copies of anything but which are more commonly thought of as acts of artistic adaptation. Copy works are in one sense a specific subset of modernist practices that foreground the technologies of reproduction and the forces of globalism and commodity capitalism that shape modernity. But copy works also open our eyes to copies everywhere. The copy allows us to recognize the delirium of sameness in modernism, as much as the obsession with innovation, and so to write and think global modernism differently.
Notes
1. The latter few examples may require some glossing. For Xu Zhimo’s use of translation and commentary as part of his modernist poetics, see Saussy, “Death and Translation.” On the collage poetics of Gandhi’s printing press in South Africa, see Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press, esp. 69–88. Tretyakov described the newspaper as the “epic and bible of our days” (Tret’iakov, “Novyi Lev Tolstoi,” 33). On Brathwaite’s poetics of versioning, see Josephs, “Versions of X/Self.”
2. On these two tendencies in recent modernist studies, see also Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies”; Ardis, “Editor’s Introduction,” vi–vii.
3. On the history of the poem’s publication and the changes in its punctuation and layout, see Ellis, “The Punctuation of ‘In a Station of the Metro,’” 204–206; Chilton and Gilbertson, “Pound’s ‘Metro Hokku,’” 225–231; Brinkman, “Making Modern Poetry,” 34–36.
4. E.g., Moretti, “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur,” 120; Owen, “What Is World Poetry?”; Owen, “Stepping Forward and Back.”
5. “Circulations” is Friedman’s term. See Friedman, “Planetarity,” 482–483; Friedman, “World Modernisms,” 503. Other related terms include “webs” (Ballantyne, “Race and the Webs of Empire”) and “relation” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation; Shih, “Comparison as Relation”). World-systems and circulation models of global modernism are contrasted in, inter alia, Hayot, “On Literary Worlds,” 131; Friedman, “World Modernisms,” 501; Boehmer, “How to Feel Global,” 601.
Works Cited
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