Considering an Unsimplified New

© Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, CC BY-SA 3.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. “Make it new”: I long ago grew tired, not of the phrase itself, but of what felt like its celebratory militant insistence on busting through everything that had come before, leaving it in the dust and declaring adolescent victory over all previous, and hence inferior, thoughts and creations and the people who’d produced them. Ezra Pound’s adaptation(s) of a phrase found in a couple of ancient Chinese accounts took on understandings of renewal and resurrection more appropriate to interpretations grounded in Christian (and later fascist) thought, but he didn’t take credit for coming up with the imperative itself. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that critics and culture cognoscenti started running with the decontextualized demand, leading, as Michael North describes it, to “the nature of novelty itself [being] simplified.”1 And there we have my irritation: that simplification that I always…