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New Media and
the Artaud Effect
Jay Murphy
New Media and the Artaud Effect
“Jay Murphy deftly excavates Antonin Artaud’s capacious visionary

thought, actions, and experiences in a riveting new study of the artist’s
infinite depths and continued contemporary relevance. Murphy uniquely
grasps Artaud’s obsession with original sources, inexhaustible search for
truth, unconventional optimism, and continual reinvention of himself
expressed in a vision of altered bodies that anticipated the cyborgian pres-
ent. Praise for this new reading of Artaud cannot do sufficient justice to
Murphy’s originality, erudition, insight, and masterful work.”
—Kristine Stiles, France Family Distinguished Professor of Art,
Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University
“The Artaud Effect is a generous book; far more exciting and ambitious
than any straightforward reception history of Artaud. Jay Murphy tracks
themes and threads from Artaud into modern and contemporary avant-
garde art practices, critical and social theory, thereby making the ‘Artaud
effect’ resonate in our present. This is a book for readers excited about the
blending and blurring of literature, film, visual arts, sorcery, hieroglyphs,
and contemporary critiques of capitalism. Artaud wrote that ‘we’re in cre-
ation up to our necks, we’re in it with every organ’, Murphy shows that
we’re in Artaud up to our necks.”
—Nikolaj Lübecker, Professor of French and Film Studies,
St. John’s College/Oxford University
“This is Jay Murphy's second book on Artaud. Like the first, it is excellent:
lucid, rigorous, transformative, accessible.
It reinvents Artaud in a way that highlights his pivotal position between
twentieth-century and twenty-first-century virtuality, an Artaud for whom,
in my language, theatricality (or cruelty) is an instance of a productive im/
materiality that does away with all those boring and dead-end debates in
Theatre and Performance Studies about presence/absence, liveness/vir-
tual/, the body/technology, politics/sacred, etc. There’s a kind of virtual-
ity to the writing as well, and the structure, with its shifts and breaks, allow
the reader a kind of capaciousness, a space to make their own journey and
virtual connections.
Jay wears his immense learning lightly. The book is stylish, wide-rang-
ing, a feast of ideas.”
—Carl Lavery, Professor of Theatre and Performance,
University of Glasgow
“Approaching Artaud through the framing of hieroglyphics, Murphy’s

book discovers much more than an avant-garde artist and thinker confined
to the era of high modernism. Instead, he discerns Artaudian hieroglyphs
at work in multiple aesthetic contexts from the poetry of Olson and Pound
to the cinema of Eisenstein and Grandrieux, and from Warburg’s visual
zig-zag iconology to Stelarc’s cyborg hacking of evolutionary processes,
not to mention in Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophies and
their aftermaths. In all of these spheres Artaud is already there in advance
gesturing through the multiple and surprising hieroglyphic figures and
hieroglyphic practices that this book reveals.”
—Michael Goddard, Reader in Film and Screen Media,
Goldsmiths/University of London
Jay Murphy
New Media and the

Artaud Effect
Jay Murphy
School for Professional Advancement
Tulane University
New Orleans, LA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-83487-6 ISBN 978-3-030-83488-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83488-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following, where portions of this

book have appeared in different forms:
Artaud’s Metamorphosis (Pavement Books, 2016). By permission of
Pavement Books.
“The Artaud Effect,” in CTheory (September 2015), https://journals.
uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/15122/6110
By permission of CTheory.
“Gary Hill and the ‘new aesthetic paradigm’”, Paper presented at the
International Association of Philosophy and Literature (IAPL) conference
‘Postmodern Sites,’ Hartford, CT, May 12, 1999. http://www.thing.
net/~soulcity/ap/index.html. By permission of author.
I owe gratitude to Lauriane Piette and her staff at Palgrave Macmillan

who selected and shepherded this manuscript. I would also like to thank
the great generosity of the artists who have provided images for this
book, and those who took valuable time to read the manuscript and
recommend it.
I also thank the following (only a very brief list) for actions great and
small, in no hierarchical order: Sharon Mesmer, Virginia Stephan,
Miuki, Pamala Bishop, Peter Valente, Joseph Nechvatal, Jonathan
Brooks Slaughter, Elizabeth Shannon, David Rivé, Michael Fedor, Seila
v
vi Acknowledgements
Susberg, Oloye Bafagunwa Awo Agbaye, Elena Bondal, Oana Aitchison,

Yota Theod, Stephen DiCillo, Shawn Williams, Jan Barnes, Sophie
Fuggle, John Hutnyk.
As is appropriate for a project in which the dead have never been more
alive, I would like to thank for past exchanges, without which many things
would be different: Clayton Eshleman (d. 2021), Carolee Schneemann
(d. 2019), and Emile de Antonio (d. 1989).
Contents
1 Living Hieroglyphs 1
Hieroglyphic Keys 2
A Universe and a Theater of Signs 4
Shedding Light on Hieroglyphic Language: Fenollosa and
Pound’s Revolution of the Word 11
Aby Warburg’s Expressivity without Subject and Eisenstein in
Mexico: Hieroglyphs in Motion 23
Hieroglyphs as Fields of Force: Olson’s Origins 31
The Originality of Artaud in Twentieth Century Hieroglyphics 45
2 The Power of Capture 51

Inner/Outer 53
Cybernetic Totality 58
Brain Matter 62
Sorcery Without Sorcerers 65
Body Without Organs as Substrate of Resistance 81
3 Beyond Hieroglyphics: I 87

“The Body Is the Self”, or Godard’s Incommensurable 89
“Impossible” Influence 97
Where Artaud’s Ghost Seems to Move the Most—Grandrieux’s
Cinema of Cruelty 99
Grandrieux and Sade 114
Constructing the “New Body” 117
vii
viii Contents
4 Beyond Hieroglyphics: II119

Klossowski’s Body Exchange, or Sharon Tate as Hieroglyph 120
The Body Remixed—Sterlarc 128
Catastrophe Theory in Gary Hill 133
“the infinite, this is me” 141
Schizophrenia as Interactive Cinema 143
Another ‘Outside’ 148
5 Don’t Forget the Virtual151

Artaud: The Urge for Destruction 154
The ‘Virtual’ as Revolutionary Source 159
Breakdowns 168
Artistic “Virtualism” 170
No Guarantees 175
Whose Groundlessness? 178
For a New ‘Anti-Psychiatry’ 181
Works Cited185
Index207
CHAPTER 1
Living Hieroglyphs
Up to a certain point, Antonin Artaud’s search for hieroglyphic keys to

another, underlying reality links him to many other seminal twentieth cen-
tury artistic projects, ranging from numerous artists of Cubism and
Surrealism, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, to Aby Warburg’s founda-
tions for a new art history (one not based on texts), to Sergei Eisenstein’s
cinema, Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound’s research into Chinese ideo-
grams as a basis for poetry, and later Charles Olson (who advocated learn-
ing from Sumerian and Mayan glyphs) extending Pound’s modernist
revolution into a what he dubbed a “postmodern” poetics.1 Even in this
context Artaud stands out, since with the possible exception of Warburg,
these projects are often limited to aesthetics, and to a single art-form,
whereas Artaud’s proposals cannot be reduced even to the single cause of
a revivified theater. Artaud used an eminently hieroglyphic means, an
extreme and severe introjection of the cross (Artaud writes at one point at
Rodez “I am the vertebral cross”2), as a key transformative process to sur-
vive nine years of horrific psychiatric confinement and emerge onto
another plane of ferocity and creativity. Artaud’s transformation, what one
1
Charles Olson. Collected Prose. Eds. by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley/
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. p. 116.
2
Artaud XV, 1981, p. 326. Quotes from Artaud’s oeuvres complètes published by Gallimard
are indicated by volume number, year, and page. All translations are mine unless specified
otherwise.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Murphy, New Media and the Artaud Effect,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83488-3_1
2 J. MURPHY
psychoanalyst judged “absolutely unique,”3 would already make his

manipulation of the hieroglyph one of the most original and singular in
the twentieth century. But an “Artaud effect” and legacy operates today
not due to this use of the hieroglyphic, but because in a series of extremely
willful, violent operations 1945–1948 he definitively annihilates any hiero-
glyph or hieroglyphic understanding. His scores of drawings, his sound
performances, his surging, increasingly unique language from 1943 on,
are identical with his self re-construction that refuses any description via
hieroglyphic patterning. Artaud himself recognizes that any hieroglyph
also goes up into the flames of the combustion of his “direct creation.”4
Artaud has thus eluded the eclipse of much of the historical avant-garde or
modernist relevance, though Stéphane Mallarmé and James Joyce, among
others, also return in intriguing manners.5
Hieroglyphic Keys
Artaud had a glimpse of what the Theater of cruelty would look like, not
just through the “black sun” ceremony of the Tarahumara Indians he had
visited in 1936, but in his own work. In a letter to Fernand Pouey, who
had commissioned the broadcast, Artaud wrote of his enthusiasm that his
radio work To have done with the judgment of god (1947–1948), “could
furnish a miniature model of what I want to do in the Theater of cruelty.”6
Earlier, in the case of The Cenci (1935),7 the only play that Artaud both
wrote8 and produced, he had no such illusions. Despite his choice of actors
(although Jean-Louis Barrault argued with one of the primary financial
backers also an actress and walked out) and stage design from his friend
3
Serge André. L’Épreuve d’Antonin Artaud et l’expérience de la psychanalyse. Brussels:
Éditons Luc Pire, 2007. p. 112.
4
Artaud XIII, 1974, p. 35.
5
See for instance Joyce’s links to creative cyberculture in Donald F. Theall. James Joyce’s
Techno-Poetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. For his part, Mallarmé, a poet
of virtuality avant la lettre, makes key appearances in Félix Guattari’s Chaosmosis (1992)
while inspiring in part Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2010) and providing the sub-
ject for his The Number and the Siren (2012). For Mallarmé’s relationship to contemporary
media theory, see Nikolaj Lübecker, “Mallarmé’s Digital Demon,” Paragraph 43 n. 2 (July
2020): 140–158.
6
Artaud XIII, 1974, p. 127. Artaud’s italics.
7
Artaud IV, 1964, pp. 183–271.
8
Artaud adapted the play from the versions by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Stendhal. For the
differences between Artaud’s version and theirs, see ibid. pp. 390–391.
1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 3
the painter Balthus, the production was made under immense haste and
financial pressure. Ironic for Artaud, the advocate of treating words as
plastic things or disintegrative vocal objects and tonalities, who had used
his collaborative Theatre Alfred Jarry, a project more Dada than Surrealist,
as the vehicle for a theater that dispensed entirely with written texts, his
performance was criticized as “verbose.”9 In advance of the production,
Artaud had already recognized that the play “is still not the Theater of
cruelty but it is a preparation for it.”10 He explained, “There will be
between the Theater of cruelty and The Cenci the difference which exists
between the roaring of a waterfall or the unleashing of a natural storm,
and all that remains of their violence once it has been recorded in an
image.”11 Despite some genuine innovations, especially in Roger
Désormière’s sound design, and a successful opening night, the problem
of The Cenci may have been that “one performance burned out the
spectacle.”12 After the initial success, reviews become uniformly hostile,
and financial problems mounted while Artaud tried to balance his direct-
ing, fundraising for the theater, acting, and struggle to pay his own hotel
bill. According to Roger Blin, who acted in the play, The Cenci to Artaud
was “a commercial piece, half-way to what he wanted to do in the
theatre.”13 Its resounding crash put an end to any hopes Artaud had of
enacting a Theater of cruelty on the Parisian stage. In another six months,
after a frantic, penurious period of scrambling, he was off to Mexico, and
a series of tumultuous peregrinations that would end in his confinement in
a straitjacket in just one more fateful year.
Given the fragmentary nature of even some of Artaud’s most brilliant
and prophetic work—the film scenarios, the theater manifestoes, or the
later radio broadcasts—that all call for the most extreme re-ordering pos-
sible of the role of any spectator or participant (a concomitant of which is
virtually the abolition of Western culture to date), that possess extraordi-
nary ambition, reputedly the very vast scale of which would entail their
failure on any earthly plane—perhaps it is not so surprising that as an his-
torical event in the life of Antonin Artaud they are to some extent rarely
realized. As Romain Weingarten claimed, “it is difficult to speak of a
9
Eric Sellin. The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1968. p. 111; also New Ed. New Orleans: Quid Pro Books, 2017.
10
Artaud V, 1964, p. 34.
11
Ibid. pp. 36–7.
12
Stephen Barber. Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs. London: Faber & Faber, 1993. p. 71.
13
Roger Blin. Souvenirs et propos. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. p. 28.
4 J. MURPHY
theater that did not take place.”14 For others, including Jean-Louis
Barrault, in his mid-twenties at the time of The Cenci, but already becom-
ing known as actor, director, and producer of the stage, Artaud’s very life
was the Theater of cruelty. Performances like Artaud’s notorious appear-
ance at Vieux-Colombier on January 13, 1947 would lend credence to
this view. Unfortunately there are no recordings of the evening, and it
would be an understatement to note that Artaud departed from the texts
he planned to present, but we are left with astounding reminiscences.
Novelist André Gide wrote in a letter to Henri Thomas:
Artaud’s lecture was more extraordinary than one could have supposed: it’s
something which has never been heard before, never seen and which one
will never again see. My memory of it is indelible—atrocious, painful, almost
sublime at moments, revolting also and quasi-intolerable.15
Journalist Maurice Saillet described Artaud’s performance in this way,
… when his impetuous hands fluttered like a pair of birds around his face; when
his raucous voice, broken by sobs and stumbling tragically, began to declaim his
splendid—but practically inaudible poems, it was as if we were drawn into the
danger zone, sucked up by that black sun, consumed by that ‘overall combus-
tion’ of a body that was itself a victim of the flames of the spirit.16
André Breton’s comment that at Vieux-Colombier Artaud had reduced

himself to man of the theater, another “performer,” was so insulting that
it was the occasion of Artaud’s final break with him.
A Universe and a Theater of Signs

We must grant Artaud these moments of realization, however fugitive. From
the January, 1948 radio broadcast to his spellbinding performances at Vieux-
Colombier in 1947 or the Sorbonne in 1933,17 to his peyote experience with
14
Qtd. in Sellin. The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud. p. 110.
15
Qtd. in H.J.Armand-Laroche. Artaud et son Double. Périgueux: Pierre-Franlac, 1964.
p. 31. Gide also wrote about the event for 19 March, 1948 issue of Combat, after Artaud’s
death; the text is included in Antonin Artaud. Oeuvres. Ed. Évelyn Grossman. Paris:
Gallimard/Quarto, 2004. p. 1191.
16
For full text see Oeuvres. p. 1190.
17
A remarkable description of this is contained in Anaïs Nin. The Journals of Anaïs Nin,
1931–1934. London: Peter Owen, 1966. p. 192. Although Artaud here personified and
the Tarahumaras—Artaud at times pierced the veils he perceived. And his

image of what he was striving for was invariably vivid. The month after the col-
lapse of The Cenci, Artaud wrote a most enthusiastic review for La Nouvelle
Revue Française of Jean-Louis Barrault’s performance in Autour d’une mère,
his adaptation of the William Faulkner novel As I Lay Dying. Barrault’s perfor-
mance itself had been inspired by his numerous close conversations and
exchanges with Artaud. In Barrault’s circling “marvelous horse-centaur”
Artaud was reminded of his entrancement by the Balinese dancers in 1931,
Barrault’s gestures “are of such beauty that they take on a symbolic sense.”18
Remarkably, Artaud compares the “magic” of Barrault’s mime to the incanta-
tions of “black sorcerers” who bring rain or chase away illness with their
breaths.19 Artaud acclaims the stylized mathematical gestures, the disciplined
movement, the “lively effervescence,” the “concert of screams” at the moment
of the death of the mother; in what Artaud describes as Barrault’s extraordi-
nary spontaneity and vigor, it is “in this sacred atmosphere, that Jean-Louis
Barrault improvises the movements of a wild horse, and one is suddenly sur-
prised to see him turn into a horse,” for Barrault has created an environment
of metamorphoses that theater “should never have lost.”20 It is not too much
to say Barrault has exemplified much, but not all, which Artaud is searching for
in terms of a hieroglyphic language, theatrically expressed:
Certainly, there are no symbols in the spectacle of Jean-Louis Barrault. And

if one is to make a reproach to his gestures, it is that they give us the illusion
of symbol, when they are outlining reality; this is why their action, however
violent it is or active, remains among all without any extensions beyond itself.21
It has no such extension or range, according to Artaud, since is “only

descriptive,” taking account of “exterior facts” where “souls” do not inter-
vene—it is here, he argues, that reproach can be made. Is Artaud, who has just
compared Barrault’s play, where a “concert of screams take life,”22 to
acted out death from the plague, while his largely student audience at first gasped, hissed,
then jeered and left, this lecture became the frontispiece essay for The Theater and Its Double.
Artaud wanted to begin his collection with this essay’s lurid imagery.
18
Artaud IV, 1964, pp. 168, 170.
19
Ibid. p. 168.
20
Ibid. p. 169.
21
Ibid. p. 170. M.C. Richards translates this last phrase, demeure en somme sans prolonge-
ments, perhaps more felicitously, as “has no range beyond itself,” in Artaud. The Theater and
Its Double. Trans. M.C. Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. p. 146.
22
Artaud IV, 1964, p. 168.
6 J. MURPHY
ceremonies of shamans or “witch doctors,” already contradicting himself in the

space of this short review? The immense achievement of Barrault, is his play’s
“direct and physical appeal,” its “animated gesticulation,” and “discontinuous
unfolding of figures … which memory will never forget.”23 Theater demands
that a physical field be opened and filled, in which one finds “new relations
between sound, gesture, and voice—and if one is able to say that this is theater,
then Jean-Louis Barrault has made it.”24
Yet Artaud ends with his doubts, deep reservations and a mysterious
yearning. Barrault has “restored magic to us … as if the very spirit of Fable
had descended among us again,” yet “this realization is not the peak”25 of
theater –
I mean the most profound drama, the mystery deeper than souls, the heart-
breaking conflict of souls where gesture is only a path. There where man is
only a point and where lives drink from their source. But who has drunk
from the source of life?26
Artaud acclaims theater while suggesting that it doesn’t probe to the

depths of existence. It is as if he is looking to Nietzsche’s “the world as a
work of art that gives birth to itself,”27 to resolve these antimonies. It is
not so surprising to learn that less than a year after writing these lines
Artaud is headed off across the ocean to experience the peyote rites with
the Tarahumara Indians; in the Sierra Tarahumara Artaud finds a veritable
“mountain of signs” in which the landscape itself becomes the communi-
cating hieroglyphics. Artaud wrote:
At every turn in the road one can find trees deliberately burned in the form
of a cross or in the form of beings, an often these beings are double and they
face one another, as though to manifest the essential duality of things; and
I have seen that duality traced back to its beginnings in a sign in the form of
Ⓗ enclosed in a circle, which I once saw branded on a tall pine with a red-hot
iron; other trees bore spears, trefoils, acanthus leaves surrounded with
crosses; here and there, in sunken places, corridors choked with rocks, rows
Ibid. p. 169.
23
Ibid. p. 170.
24
25
Artaud uses the word tête, or ‘top’, ‘head.’ In using “peak” I’m following M.C. Richards’
rendering.
26
Ibid. p. 171.
27
Friedrich Nietzsche. Note 796, The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufman and
R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, [1884–1888] 1968. p. 419.
of Egyptian ankhs deployed in files; and the doors of Tarahumara houses

displayed by the Maya world-symbol: two facing triangles whose points are
joined by a bar; and this bar is the Tree of Life passing through the center
of Reality.28
In the mountains of the Tarahumaras, Artaud felt he had found, among

these people “older than the Flood,” the primordial “science” of being, that
Artaud at this point still associated with the Kabbalah, this “music of num-
bers … which reduces material chaos to its prime elements” and that it “explains
by a kind of grandiose mathematics how Nature orders and directs the birth of
forms she brings forth out of chaos.”29 In at least this part of the journey
Artaud had felt his initial auspicious intimations validated. He had written Jean
Paulhan from Cuba, “Since docking at Havana I have been seeing intellectuals
and artists and already I feel I am in the vein I was seeking. I am even wonder-
ing if this time the illusions will not prove inferior to the reality.”30 Indeed,
Artaud would declare that in the Sierra Tarahumara it was there, “on the entire
geographic area of a race that Nature has wanted to speak.”31 Perhaps Artaud
thought he had found the “sacred speech” that Heraclitus had defined as that
which “neither speaks out nor conceals, but gives a sign.”32 For Maurice
Blanchot, Heraclitus, in referring to the language of Delphi, was citing a lan-
guage that spoke “in the manner of those oracles that are oracles through
signs, scorings and incisions—writing—in the text of things.”33 For Blanchot
this sign is a “difference” that suspends and contains all others, an “original
torsion,” that concentrates the “entanglement” that modes of speech, espe-
cially modes of dialectical speech that seek to “put [language] to use,” as in the
pairs of speech/silence, word/thing, affirmation/negation.34 It indicates a
kind of “immobility,” or suspension, that paradoxically “moves more than any-
thing moving,” producing a “disorientation … that has no bounds.”35
In one of his articles written in Mexico City published on 24 May 1936,
Artaud gave his reasons of why he was seeking this language in Mexico:
28
Artaud IX, 1974, p. 47.
29
Ibid.
30
Artaud V, 1964, p. 274.
31
Artaud IX, 1974, p. 43. Italics in the original.
32
Heraclitus, Fr. 244, in The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Ed. by G.S.Kirk, J.E. Raven, and
M. Schofield. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. p. 209. The phrase
“sacred speech” is from Blanchot, not Heraclitus.
33
Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, [1969] 1993. p. 31.
34
Ibid. pp. 31–2.
35
Ibid. p. 27.
8 J. MURPHY
I studied at length the Gods of Mexico in the Codices, and it appeared to

me that these Gods were above all Gods in space, and that the Mythology
of the Codices hid a science of space with its Gods like holes of shadows and
its shadows where life growls.
That is to say, without literature, that these Gods were not born by acci-
dent, but that they are in life as in theater, and that they occupy the four
corners of the consciousness of Man in which are tucked sound, gesture, the
word, and the breath which spits forth life.36
These “holes of shadows” sound very much like the “hieroglyphs” in

his theater manifestos, or the discussion of “motif” in the paintings of Van
Gogh by the later Artaud in 1947. Here theater is merged with any notion
of sens or culture altogether; what Artaud in another place called the “lar-
val possibilities that one day formed culture.”37 In this tribe isolated in the
mountains northwest of Mexico City, Artaud sought those who “still pos-
sessed a culture, a culture which was one with life.”38 Calling them in one
text “the race of lost men,”39 Artaud realized that this culture was badly
damaged, and barely extant. “This culture subsists,” Artaud wrote, “it is
in tatters, but it subsists.”40 In this respect, Artaud’s journey parallels that
of filmmaker Maya Deren to Haiti in the late 1940s, where participants in
the voudun rituals would tell her many orishas no longer “came down” to
the ceremonies.41 That the Tarahumara culture in particular, is a stubborn
survival but also decimated in some respects, is documented in the series
of some eleven documentaries made by Paris-based filmmaker Raymonde
Carasco from 1979–2003; her 1999 film Ciguri 99—Tarahumaras, for
instance, is subtitled “the last shaman.”42
36
Artaud. “Le Théatre et les dieux,” Oeuvres. p. 703.
37
Artaud XII, 1974, p. 245.
38
Artaud V, 1964, p. 281.
39
Artaud IX, 1971. pp. 97–100.
40
Artaud V, 1964, p. 281.
41
See Maya Deren. Divine Horsemen. New Paltz: McPherson & Co., [1953] 1985. The
film footage and sound recordings made by Deren in Haiti, also titled Divine Horsemen
(1985), was only edited long after her death in 1961. For further exploration of Deren’s
research and its significance for Artaud, see the discussion “The cross and the crossroads,
redux” in chapter V of my Artaud’s Metamorphosis. London: Pavement Books, 2016.
42
http://raymonde.carasco.online.fr. Carasco combines ethnographic examination and
overview with the methods of experimental filmmaking, making studies of the rhythm and
rhythmic gestures of the Tarahumara Indians, a project primarily inspired by Artaud.
This fascination with what he saw as the immediately expressive and

active power characteristic of Mayan, Aztec, or Toltec codices, preceded
Artaud’s trip; his text “Mexico and Civilization,”43 for instance, was writ-
ten in Paris before his trip to Mexico, and his scenario “The Conquest of
Mexico” (1933),44 was his first conception for a doable Theater of cruelty
project. In the ancient Mexican hierograms, the juxtaposition of animal
and human; the presentation in one panel of what would require several in
any temporally linear succession; the frequent depiction of sacrifice (and
certainly of cruelty or action in Artaud’s sense); the achievement of a pro-
foundly dramatic, sacramental effect or stage (mise-en-scène) without
resorting to any normal narrative or regular linguistic script; the vivid
color; their intention as a direct means to activate magick or religious
power, would all have tremendous appeal for Artaud.45 As Theodor-
Wilhelm Danzel, a visiting scholar at the convocations organized by Carl
Jung at Eranos in Switzerland, wrote, “Scarcely any other people not yet
in possession of phonetic writing has given us such a wealth of symbolic
signs and images … the Mexicans had no phonetic writing: they had no
accurate, literal means of registering the spoken word. Many conceptions
which with us have paled to abstraction were them still image and
symbol.”46 Danzel’s position, “Much that in our culture has grown dim
and conceptual remained for them concrete and visible,”47 would appear
to summarize Artaud’s own. By way of pursuing cultures literally based on
hieroglyphic signs, Artaud was following his own dictates that any true
culture could not be written down, or based on such limited linguistic
constrictions. Bracketing for the moment a discussion concerning the
accuracy and the problematics of the notion that in cultures based on
43
Artaud VIII, 1971, pp. 127–32.
44
Artaud IV, 1964, pp. 151–3, and Artaud V, 1964, p. 21.
45
For similar appreciation of Maya codices, see William S. Burroughs. The Book of Breething.
New York: Blue Wind Press, [1974] 1980; and Ah, Pook Is Here and Other Texts. London:
J. Calder, 1979. An example in science fiction is Neal Stephanson’s Snow Crash, where
ancient Sumerian script is described as a neurolinguistic code that directly “hacks the brain-
stem” of the subcortical limbic system. As in Burroughs’ interpretation of the Mayans, only
an elite class of priests are aware of how the language or codices work, or produce effects;
they preside over a population that behave as automatons. See Neal Stephanson. Snow Crash.
New York: Bantam Books, 1992.
46
Theodor-Wilhelm Danzel, “The Psychology of Ancient Mexican Symbolism,” in
Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. Bollingen Series XXX, vol. 4
New York: Pantheon Books, 1960. p. 102.
47
Ibid.
10 J. MURPHY
hieroglyphic language people perceive differently, or in some more holistic

manner, we can note for now, the prevalence of this idea, at least from
André Malraux’s The Temptation of the West in 1926,48 to Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence49 in 2004. For instance, Jean Gebser’s
view that modern mathematics, with the belief in the potency of its formu-
las, betray its origins in picture-magic, based on the sympathetic action
between picture and reality, mathematics’ “predominantly magical
component;”50 Gebser argues that languages with prominent guttural
sounds, such as those that survive in modern Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and
several Swiss dialects, “permit conclusions about the psychic and vital
structure of the respective peoples, and their closer promixity to the incep-
tual k [according to Gebser a “primordial sound” formed earlier than
many others] and the magic world.”51
Keeping in mind that Artaud often seemed to indiscriminately mix
together all sorts of non-Western hieroglyphic languages, sign-languages,
and languages based on gesture, (although he frequently specifically
envokes the Chinese and Japanese ideogram in the theater manifestos),
Ezra Pound, himself an advocate of the hieroglyph as a potent resource for
poetry, helps to begin to illuminate some of the difficulties here:
The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the
Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese
ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign
recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given
position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the
action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures.52
It could be said Artaud is succumbing to the temptation, not of oppos-

ing one sense to another, but perhaps of what Blanchot described as lan-
guage’s ability to act “as though we were able to see the thing from all
sides.”53 Yet, in his early creed The ABC of Reading, Pound cites the sphere
48
André Malraux. La Tentation de l’occident. Paris: Grasset, 1926; The Temptation of the
West. Trans. R. Hollander. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
49
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Production of Presence. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004.
50
Jean Gebser. The Ever-Present Origin. Trans. Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas. Athens:
Ohio University Press, [1949, 1953] 1985. n. 45 pp. 106–7.
51
Ibid. n. 20 p. 183.
52
Ezra Pound. The ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, [1934] 1960. p. 21.
53
Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation. p. 28.
or cube, in recommending that in the examination of any matter, one

must do just that—keep on until one has seen it from all sides.
Shedding Light on Hieroglyphic Language:

Fenollosa and Pound’s Revolution of the Word
This interpretation of the Chinese character as “relation” was the key for
Pound. And it is important for this project on Artaud to discuss further
Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s contribution, not in any superficial sense of
analogy, but in regard to what they illuminate about Artaud’s own
searches, for Artaud’s investigation is at the heart of what has remained
important in mid-twentieth century aesthetics and poetics, and his origi-
nality can only be plumbed by looking at some of these parallel lines—in
this instance, Pound and Fenollosa’s use of Chinese to revivify poetics.
The extremely close relationship of Artaud’s search to Pound and Fenollosa
is all the more remarkable in that it has so rarely been expanded upon. As
with Aby Warburg and Sergei Eisenstein, the recent discovery of the
motion picture and the role of the cinematic is of crucial import.
Contrary to the mainstream Western interpretation since the seven-
teenth century in Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Francis Bacon, and
others, that the Chinese language was a vast compendium of naming
objects, of things in the world, Pound, following the researches of Ernest
Fenollosa54 in Japan, reclaimed the Chinese ideogram as a language of
verbs-in-motion. Fenollosa’s manuscripts set off an extraordinary “inven-
tion of China”55 in Pound, but it was a lesson he had already been moving
toward steadily, for instance in his poem “In a Station of the Metro”
(1913). A poem of only two lines, it is composed of five different percep-
tions, or phases of perception:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

Petals on a wet, black bough .56
54
Ernest Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as Medium for Poetry: A Critical
Edition. Ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. New York: Fordham University
Press, [1919] 2008.
55
Hugh Kenner’s phrase in the chapter of the same name in his The Pound Era. Berkeley/
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.
56
Ezra Pound. Poems and Translations. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: Library of
America, 2003. p. 287. Sieburth publishes the poem without the “ideogrammic” spacing,
12 J. MURPHY
Pound’s well-known poem, inspired from his study of Japanese hokku,

has the qualities he and Fenollosa championed in the ideogram—it is a
sketch of process, of unfolding action, entering fields of perception, only
momentarily, as in a filmic or photographic “capture,” framed in such a
manner that “particulars rush from and through and into.”57 This filmic
nature was insisted upon by Fenollosa, who wrote, “A true noun, an iso-
lated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points,
or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions,
snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in
nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in
things.”58 This fecundity of nature relays itself in language inseparable
from vital processes, since “the whole delicate system of speech is built
upon substrata of metaphor … Nature furnishes her own clues. Had the
world not been full of homologies, sympathies, and identities, thought
would have been starved and language chained to the obvious.”59 Fenollosa
linked this dynamism of language, the transitive sentence that imitates
nature, “with something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.”60
Single ideograms were thus like single cinema frames, dependent for their
meaning in their moving succession or picture made by combination, in
one instance producing the film in the other the poetic line or the declara-
tive sentence. Fenollosa’s lectures, dating from 1901–1906, and orga-
nized by Pound in 1914–1915, are all the more remarkable in that the
Vitascope, the first projector, which made viewing moving pictures possi-
ble for the first time, dates only from 1901.61 This is a strong corollary to
Eisenstein’s theory, who observed of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, that
Mayakovsky does not work in lines:

Emptiness. Wings aloft
Into the stars carving your way.
He works in shots:
Emptiness.
Wing aloft,
Into the stars carving your way.
which was part of its publication in April 1913 in Poetry. Sieburth notes this without giving
reasons for his preference (see ibid. p. 1280 n.287.1).
57
Kenner. The Pound Era. p. 160.
58
Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as Medium for Poetry. p. 46.
59
Ibid. p. 54.
60
Ibid. p. 45.
61
Here Mayakovsky cuts his line just as an experienced film editor would in
constructing a typical sequence of ‘impact’ (the stars—and Ysenin). First—
the one. Then —the other. Followed by the impact of one against the other.62
Fenollosa and Pound often emphasized the addition, damage, or change

wrought on the predicate in a sentence-line, since it was subject to a field
of force, and motion. One perception led to another perception, charged
cognition. The Chinese ideogram is a direction of energy, a movement of
force. The words may remain static on the page, but like Aby Warburg’s
commentary on the photo of the Indian girl holding a heraldic vase on her
head would lead us to believe, it presents a picture in motion. Warburg
had written, “To attribute motion to a figure that is not moving, it is nec-
essary to reawaken in oneself a series of experienced images following the
one from the other—not a single image; a loss of calm contemplation.”63
For Warburg ‘hieroglyphs’ could move in even static art, as in this exam-
ple, a conjunction of sign and figure, that must be read, not just seen, but
in a reading that is reliant on movement. Consequently any interpretation
for Warburg must be enacted, or danced into being, any art partaking of
the art of movement.
Eisenstein’s film aesthetics were built up on similar juxtapositions, but
this time on the similarity of Japanese script to film montage. In Eisenstein’s
1929 essay “Beyond the Shot”64 he argued that two hieroglyphs juxta-
posed produced a “third” image, of a different nature, not merely a third
image or object. Two hieroglyphs thus have a product, another order of
meaning, not a sum total. This is reflected in Eisenstein’s films as what
Roland Barthes characterized as a “nub of facets.”65 As Eisenstein wrote of
his film Ivan the Terrible (1944), the different positions of the czar are
given in a play of presence and absence “without link between one posi-
tion and the next.”66 Without such determinate links, we are in the realm
62
Sergei Eisenstein. The Film Sense. Ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. London: Faber & Faber,
1955. p. 63.
63
Qtd. in Philippe-Alain Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Trans. Sophie
Hawkes. New York: Zone Books, 2004. p. 262.
64
Eisenstein, Selected Works 1. Trans. Richard Taylor. London: BFI, 1988. pp. 138–50.
65
Roland Barthes. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press,
1977. p. 63.
66
Eisenstein quoted ibid. It is part of Eisenstein’s great achievement for Barthes that this
supplementary, “obtuse” or “third meaning” circulates in his work, subverting yet not can-
celing the narrative or story of the film, producing an active residue, an enlivening seemingly
14 J. MURPHY
of the figures separated by black space like a film storyboard as in Aby

Warburg’s Mnemosyne. Any two given hieroglyphs in Eisenstein’s view will
produce a different result; for instance, if two hieroglyphs correspond to
an object, the third produced will be a concept:
a dog and a mouth mean “to bark

a mouth and a baby mean “to scream”
a mouth and a bird mean “to sing”
a knife and a heart mean “sorrow”
and so on.67
Although this sounds identical to Eisenstein’s Russian compatriot Les

Kuleshov’s famous experiments in juxtaposed images, of collation of one
shot with another, Eisenstein criticized Kuleshov’s theories as overly linear.
Eisenstein’s montage is not a collection of shots, of what Kuleshov called a
“dramatic chain … laid out in shot-signs, like bricks,”68 but rather a mon-
tage of shock and collision of elements that overrun Kuleshov’s externally
linked frames and montage. According to Eisenstein, this shock could be
registered in a single, isolate image. In describing this semic overflow
beyond the boundaries of the frame, Eisenstein uses the same term as
Artaud, referring to its “zigzag”—“Just as a zigzag of mimicry flows over,
making those same breaks into a zigzag of spatial staging.”69 Aby Warburg’s
zigzag is recounted in his 1923 lecture where he compared the movements
of Indian dancers handling snakes to montaged images; like Eisenstein’s
film hieroglyphs these Indians in ritual have also lost their individuated
distinctions in convulsive dancing movement of lightning and the serpent,
for which the “zigzag” remains the graphic shorthand and stand-in.70
Although some film theorists have argued that Eisenstein’s ideas of
“shock” in film montage are far much more effective in practice than in
theory,71 they are still liable, as in the polemics with Dziga Vertov, to be
independent signifier of “representation which cannot be represented,” a “filmic quality”

Barthes argues is beyond both language and metalanguage. See ibid. p. 64.
67
Eisenstein. Selected Works I. p. 139.
68
Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov on Films. Trans. and ed. Ronald Levaco. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1974. p. 91.
69
Eisenstein. Selected Works 1. p. 145.
70
This full description of the Oraibi snake dance is found in Aby Warburg. Le Rituel du
Serpent. Paris: Macula, 2002.
71
Prominently Marie Claire Guilleum Ropars-Wuilleumier, see her essays on Eisenstein’s
October (1928): “The Overture of October.” Trans. Kimberly Lockhart and Larry Crawford.
seen as forming dialectical wholes or a ““spiral,” even if not the bourgeois

“convergence” Deleuze criticizes in D.W. Griffith’s spectacles.72 In
Eisenstein the interval takes on new meaning, but it also informs a new
whole as well. This is why for Gilles Deleuze Eisenstein is a master of clas-
sical cinema; his “third” meanings are integrated into new configurations.
In contrast with Artaud there are no such dialectical resolutions. Artaud’s
images, after all, “project in the light of an evidence without recourse.”73
His search for an “absolute image” does not entail any links into an even-
tual spiral, but rather a profound loss of the usual sensory-motor links to
word and image that have been loosed from their usual moorings, now
free to roam and overwhelm the spectator. Eisenstein’s montage produces
a shock for impact and ignition; for Deleuze Eisenstein films show “the
development of consciousness itself.”74 Artaud’s shock is of a different
order. With Artaud it is a matter of realizing one cannot possibly grasp a
coherent whole or totality, perhaps that one cannot think at all, as in
Heidegger’s “What is most thought-provoking is that we are still not
thinking.”75 This is why for Gilles Deleuze Artaud’s originality is in
describing the disintegration of classical cinema, of a “movement-image”
where action is shown in real-time, as opposed to its successor, the “time-
image,” where paradoxically time appears for itself, no longer subordi-
nated to movement. Remarkably, already in 1927 Artaud is writing about
how the image is no longer believable. For Deleuze Artaud has decimated
the conceptual structure of the suggested “movement-image,” and the
“internal monologue” voiced through the image, is released from any
“realist” or “naturalist” coordinates and becomes the perpetual schizo-
phrenia of a voice within a voice. Artaud has presaged the contemporary
condition in which “we no longer believe in this world.”76
Enclitic 2 n. 2 (Fall 1978): 50–72; and “The Overture of October, Part II.” Trans. Kimberly
Lockhart and Larry Crawford. Enclitic 3 n. 1 (spring 1979): 35–47.
72
Deleuze. Cinema 1. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986. pp. 35–6.
73
Artaud III, 1961, p. 23.
74
Deleuze. Cinema 1. p. 36.
75
Martin Heidegger. What Is Called Thinking? Trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray.
New York: Harper & Row, 1974. p. 4. The Heideggerian strain in Artaud is a staple of much
French commentary on the artist, such as in the writings of Philippe Sollers and Jacques
Derrida.
76
Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.
Minneapolis: Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 1989. p. 171.
16 J. MURPHY
This all too brief discussion of film aesthetics is not out of place in a
section dedicated to Fenollosa and Pound’s use of Chinese ideograms, not
merely because the new medium of film is a decisive impact on how
Fenollosa reads Chinese characters, but all the more importantly because
Fenollosa’s study is precisely about the conflict between poetry, which is
to him predominantly an art of time, successive weavings of sound, and
the medium of language (Chinese) that is a “visible hieroglyphics,” a
largely pictorial appeal to the eye.77 This conflict only becomes more
prominent and violent in the later works of Artaud, but holding for the
moment this suggested schema between “movement” and “time” images
in which Artaud is the key transitional figure, it becomes apparent they are
completely reliant on hieroglyphic qualities. At the beginning of his dis-
cussion of the “movement-image” Deleuze describes the rarefication
(where the image tends to black or white) or saturation (the multiplication
of objects or compression of space within the frame) of the film frame,
maintaining that the frame “teaches us that the image is not merely given
to be seen. It is as legible as it is visible.”78 In discussing the new forms of
montage that arrive with the “time-image,” Deleuze writes of a moment
of suspension, where the eye “accedes to a function of clairvoyance.” Here
“the elements of the image, which are not only visual but also sonorous,
enter the internal relations that require the entire image to be ‘read’ no
less than seen, to be as legible as it is visible.”79 With this one can argue
that the “movement-image” of classical cinema becomes the “time-image”
of postwar cinema whenever this hieroglyphic quality appears or inter-
venes, or, alternatively that the hieroglyph ties these two types of montage
together.80 So Artaud’s struggle and experiments with sound, from attack-
ing the then novel synchronization of sound/image,81 to a little later
advocating “following the crowd in order to direct it”82 and urging the
creation of a very large screen in which sound could emanate in all direc-
tions, is of not merely historical interest. Such an investigation of the
77
Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. p. 43.
78
79
80
Tom Conley. Film Hieroglyphs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1991]
2007. p. xv.
81
See his essay “Les Suffrances du ‘Dubbing’” in Artaud III, 1961. pp. 100–103.
82
Ibid. p. 164.
constitution and dissolution of the cinematic hieroglyphic remains in fact

an order of the day.83
For Artaud these dynamics are ones of force and power. And this cine-
matic thread, seen as “transference of power” also runs through the poet-
ics of Fenollosa and Pound. For Fenollosa, even the most basic sentence
moves, since any abstraction has its roots in a direct action, reflecting natu-
ral processes, and natural forces:
All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transference
of power. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes
between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be
less than this … Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will, have this
in common, that they redistribute force.84
In this, Fenollosa was heavily influenced not only by his study of the
Japanese transcriptions of the Chinese originals, and his guides in Japan,
but also by American Transcendentalism. As Fenollosa was well aware,
Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in “The Poet”(1844), “Things admit
of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in the whole and in
every part.” To Emerson, “the etymologist finds the deadest word to have
been once a brilliant picture.”85 Following this, Fenollosa saw that like
nature itself “Chinese language naturally knows no grammar.”86 In
Chinese ideographs, “Man sees horse,” and soon is set out “a vivid short-
hand picture of the operations of nature … First stands the man on his two
legs. Second, his eye moves through space: a bold figure represented by
two running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified
picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third
83
This is true if one accepts that such “hieroglyphic” or “figural” dynamics form much of
the matrix for our contemporary electronic sensorium, the argument of David Rodowick in
his Reading the Figural (2001).
84
85
Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Portable Emerson. Ed. by Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley.
New York: Viking, 1982. For this line of thinking, Emerson’s essays “The Poet,” “Nature”
(1836), and “Method of Nature” (1841), are especially important. Given the Nietzschean
resonance of Fenollosa’s characterization of language as the “transferences of power,” per-
haps Niezsche’s admiration for Emerson should be noted here. For example in The Gay
Science. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1974. pp. 146, 191. For Nietzsche’s
relation to Emerson, see Kaufman’s “Translator’s Introduction,” ibid. pp. 7–13. Nietzsche’s
term übermensch came from the title of Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul.”
86
Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. pp. 50–51.
18 J. MURPHY
stands the horse on his four legs.” The same dynamic arises in a phrase like
“Sun rises (in the) east, the overtones vibrate against the eye.” To
Fenollosa,
The wealth of composition in characters makes possible a choice of words in

which single dominant overtone colors every plane of meaning. That is per-
haps the most conspicuous quality of Chinese poetry. Let us examine our
line. The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east,
which is the sun entangled in the branches of a tree. And in the middle sign,
the verb “rise,” we have a further homology; the sun is above the horizon,
but beyond that the single upright line is like the growing trunk-line of the
tree sign. This is but a beginning, but it points a way to the method, and to
the method of intelligent reading.87
The enthusiastic Pound, who in his celebrated definition of “Imagism”

in 1915 had written “Energy creates patterns,” found in this “the funda-
mentals of all aesthetics.”88 As Pound had written, “An ‘Image’ is that
which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of
time.”89 He would later characterize, in defining the equally short-lived
movement of ‘Vorticism,’ the image in this way: “The image … is a radiant
node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from
which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”90 The spaces between
and within the individual ideograms were manifestly full of room for this
“rushing,” this hurried complexity.
Fenollosa’s formulations have been controversial. As Hugh Kenner
pointed out, the “ideographs” so attractive to Fenollosa, that are indeed
elemental to the language and in frequent use, compose about one-tenth
of written Chinese; the other nine-tenths specify sounds, and indicate
which of its meanings to select.91 This aspect Chinese ideograms hold in
common with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are even more strictly
mimetic; even the oldest Egyptian pictograms can be separated into those
that communicate solely by indicated sound (phonograms), and those that
carry only meaning values (semograms).92 Fenollosa’s theory of sound in
87
Ibid. p. 60.
88
Pound ibid. p. 41.
89
Ezra Pound. The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1954. p. 4.
90
Ezra Pound. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1960. p. 92.
91
92
Penelope Wilson. Hieroglyphs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 7.
Chinese language, had so little to do with the thrust of his argument—

that it was a dynamic picture-language—that in editing his manuscripts
and extracting an aesthetic theory from them, Pound simply left this out.93
That the efficacy of Chinese language had much to do with its sound, was
attested to, later, by Pound himself, who in later editions of the Fenollosa
material, would remark that “The whole Occident is still in crass igno-
rance of the Chinese art of verbal sonority,” due to its neglect of the
soundings of the sequence of Chinese vowels, and went on to say, in what
Kenner characterizes as “his supreme compliment” –“I now doubt that it
was inferior to the Greek.”94 In Pound’s own use of ideograms in his
poems, at least from 1954 on in the Confucian Odes and sections of The
Cantos,95 starting with Canto LXXXV, is as likely to appear phonetically as
in ideographs.
What Fenollosa had in common with the seventeenth century interpre-
tations which appalled him for their poetic paucity, was the idea that one
can read Chinese without knowing its sound, and in the knowledge that
in different regions the characters yield different sounds altogether yet is
still standardized communication; like Francis Bacon and Leibniz before
him, Fenollosa was banking on the notion that human speech was a side-
issue, and not crucial to ideograms which for Fenollosa were primarily
visual, that registered things seen. As Hugh Kenner explained,
it is true that the pronunciation varies endlessly through uncountable dia-

lects, none primary; that many homophones when the characters were
formed are homophones no longer; that one can understand written pages
without learning to pronounce them at all. The point is that random simi-
93
An argument for Fenollosa’s position regarding sound is re-established by the editors of
the 2008 critical edition of his work, see Haun Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A
Discrimination,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. pp. 31–33. In
fact, Fenollosa devoted an entire essay to the issue of the sound of Chinese characters, in
“Lecture I. Vol. II, (1903)” see “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II,”
in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. pp. 126–143. In editing Fenollosa’s
material, Pound largely ignored this essay.
94
Pound in Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry p. 60.;
Kenner. The Pound Era. p. 226. For another examination of Pound’s relationship to Chinese
poetry, see Ming Xie. Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry. Baltimore:
Garland Publishing, 1999.
95
Ezra Pound. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, [1970] 1989.
20 J. MURPHY
larities of sound have determined which elements are common to many sets
of characters, so that they are not graphed metaphors as Fenollosa thought.96
Kenner finds that in Pound’s case, many of the fabled “errors” and
mistakes in translation from Chinese were quite “deliberate decisions of a
man who was inventing a new kind of English poem and picking up hints
where he could find them.”97 Yet, whether we are looking at Pound, who
found his immense ambitions for totality, for accounting for the sphere,
ultimately frustrated in his Cantos, or Fenollosa, we are watching efforts
at drawing on a universal, well-nigh primordial, or “ideal” language.
Fenollosa generalized in this way,
We have seen our own languages have all sprung from a few hundred vivid
phonetic verbs by figurative derivation. A fabric more vast could have been
built up in Chinese by metaphorical comparison. No attenuated idea exists
which it might not have reached more vividly and more permanently than
we could have expected to reach with phonetic roots. Such a pictorial
method, whether the Chinese exemplified it or not, would be the ideal lan-
guage of the world.98
Leibniz in the 1670’s was classing Chinese language as a system of

nouns, but his view could be summarized in almost identical fashion; that
ideograms, “If they are based on a philosophy of things, and represented
the simple and composite nature of things, he thought that they might
well serve as ‘universal characteristics’ for the entire world.”99
As close as these preoccupations will seem to Artaud’s project, the dif-
ferences are all the more revealing. Even as Artaud climbs up the Sierra
Tarahumaras on his horse, inundated by the figures and symbols in what
has become a vibrating “mountain of signs,” this immersion in a kind of
primordial imagery and language, effusions from the deepest stratums of
96
Kenner. The Pound Era. p. 228. On pages 227–228, Kenner gives examples of com-
pound-ideograms, based on the syllable fang, that depend absolutely for their meaning on
their sound.
97
Kenner. The Pound Era. pp. 218–219. Kenner’s detective work in this regard is
remarkable.
98
99
Paul Cornelius. Languages in 17th and Early Eighteenth Century Imaginary Voyages.
Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1965. p. 101.
the ‘collective unconscious’ for a Jungian interpreter,100 is not on the order

of an “ideal language.” And Fenollosa and Pound, searching for a lan-
guage that represents nature,101 is referring to a cosmology Artaud in his
early writings is already challenging. For all the appeals to blood and soil
in his Mexican addresses even in these instances Artaud is looking for a
re-creation, not a copy of archaic rites; this he has in common with
Fenollosa and Pound who are also looking for “frucification” and a
“renaissance”102 that is no simple return to the past or copying the poetics
of a past culture. But the creation Artaud is looking for is something other
than nature, which he will write in a text in 1935 is already an
“abstraction.”103 Although Fenollosa and Pound open up the graphic and
spacing element in writing,104 with widespread consequences for literary
and poetic avant-gardes to follow, Artaud is not looking for “graphed
metaphors” in Kenner’s term; he is not looking for metaphors at all. His
collection of theater manifestoes is a concentrated argument against meta-
phor, which symbolizes much of what Artaud detests in literature and the
“literariness” he has gone up into the mountains to escape. These con-
trasts serve to show not Artaud’s uselessness in concepts, but rather the
limitations of Fenollosa and Pound’s, whose striking articulation of a lan-
guage closer to the action of things is ultimately tied to the fate of a new
poetics. Artaud’s engagement with many of the same ideas is confounded
rather with gesture, primarily to be enacted through a new theater
(whether one looks at the ‘early’ Artaud of the 1920’ and ‘30s or the post-
Rodez Artaud 1946-8), but is not limited to such—Artaud’s idea of cru-
elty, or determinable rigorous action, rebounds through film, writing,
visual art, sound works alike; it is not limited to one medium but rather
especially in the ‘late’ Artaud acts in-between media, much as certain
100
See for instance the account in Bettina Knapp. Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision.
pp. 155–158.
101
This remains a profoundly processual vision of nature, so though the linguistic sentence
stems from nature, the number of sentences to account for nature would have to be infinite.
See The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. p. 47.
102
Pound in Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. p. 41.
103
Artaud VIII, 1971, p. 122.
104
Jacques Derrida credits this, along with the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, for the dislo-
cation or “the first rupture in what is the most profound Occidental tradition,” in Of
Grammatalogy. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
[1967]1976. p. 92.
22 J. MURPHY
sounds or howls in his To have done with the judgment of god act as gravi-
tational black holes that pull in or sink the other sounds.
Yet, to make this comparison fair, I also must emphasize the great
extent to which Pound’s poetics is also a poetics of the in-between or
interval. Although Hugh Kenner calls Pound an artist trying to remain
faithful to the relational chain that is “proper to the initial experience,”105
what Pound writes about his process leads in another direction. In refer-
ence to his poem “In the Station of the Metro” Pound writes, “The ‘one-
image poem’ is a form of super-imposition, that is to say, it is one idea set
on top of another … In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the
precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or
darts into a thing inward and subjective.”106 Pound seems to suggest that
his form of “imagism,” although certainly concerned with the formation
of “a more definite image than the laymen can cast,”107 is primarily about
intervals, the space of movement between what is captured. Later in the
same book Pound glosses on the line “The pine-tree in mist upon the far
hill looks like a fragment of Japanese armour.”108 Pound concludes that
“The tree and the armour are beautiful because their diverse planes overlie
in a certain manner,”109 emphasizing, as in his Japanese or Chinese sources
the arrangement and juxtaposition in space. Kenner is right to point out
this contemporaneity of Pound’s method with analytic Cubism, without
asking how Cubist fragmentation, itself an exploration of the universe’s
ultimate forms and modes of transformation, was still compatible with
Aristotelian mimesis; paradoxically, in his praise, Kenner undercuts the
radicality of Pound’s experiment, and the field of openness created. Pound
paid tribute to Aristotle in many places in his oeuvre, yet fidelity to
Aristotelian mimesis could not possibly have created the field-change
Pound opened up for English language poetry, and poetics in general.
In a moment I will show how extending Fenollosa and Pound’s
advances in poetics comes ever closer to Artaud, in the movement of lan-
guage (recovered in its most hieroglyphic and historically primordial
foundings) into gesture and dance that is suggested and activated in the
work of Charles Olson, whose advocacy of writing as an action and a
105
Hugh Kenner. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber, 1951. p. 73.
106
Pound. Gaudier-Brzeska. p. 103.
107
Ibid. p. 147.
108
Ibid. p 146.
109
Ibid.
cosmological transformation indeed smacks of Artaud in manifold ways.

But first I want to underline the similar discoveries of Aby Warburg and
the critical importance of the experience of primitive rites in his experience
and Sergei Eisenstein’s as well. Contemporaries of Artaud, they help dem-
onstrate both the singularity of Artaud’s project, and how it is at the heart
of the most vital experiments in and beyond mid-twentieth century art.
Aby Warburg’s Expressivity without Subject

and Eisenstein in Mexico: Hieroglyphs in Motion
If the examples of Fenollosa and Pound are so near, and yet so far from
Artaud’s hieroglyphics, it pays to look more closely at another mid-
twentieth century exploration: that of Aby Warburg’s, whose personal and
theoretical parallels with Artaud are often striking. Warburg, like Artaud
with Lacan, was at one point pronounced “incurable” by a famous psy-
chiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger, and yet rebounded using his Mnemosyne
project as a kind of primitive cure. Indeed, his lecture on the Pueblo
Indian rituals in 1923 at the Kreuzlingen clinic where he had been institu-
tionalized as “schizophrenic” just two years before, was presented as a
cardinal sign of his recovery. Like Artaud with the Tarahumaras, Warburg’s
visits to the Amerindians of New Mexico and Arizona were among the
most profound events of his life, and the fountainhead of his ideas for an
“art history without a text.”110 Warburg found in such rites nothing less
than “a liberating experience of the boundless communicability between
man and environment.”111 The tradition of art history Warburg inaugu-
rated may have focused on the meaning of particular icons and individual
figures, but for Warburg what was important was the dynamism of the
space between them, their relationality, what he termed his “iconology of
the interval.”112 Artaud called for gestures evoking the “Speech before
words;”113 Warburg sought to create a model of art history that func-
tioned beyond language or even metalanguage, that was concerned with
nothing less than a “new style of apprehending aesthetic phenomena …
110
Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. p. 262.
111
Aby Warburg. Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians. Trans. Michael P. Steinberg.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. p. 2.
112
Qtd. in Ernest Gombrich. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. London: Warburg
Institute, 1970. p. 253.
113
Artaud IV, 1964, p. 72.
24 J. MURPHY
where knowledge is transformed into a cosmological configuration and

the rift between the production of the works and their interpretation is
abolished.”114 As in the multitudinous juxtaposed images of the Mmenosyne
or Atlas project, that Warburg assembled in different versions until his
death in 1929,115 his version of art history not only had to be assembled,
but enacted in this assemblage, following the movement from image to
image, with the liminality or the space in-between activating the dance.
Warburg organized his images like a film storyboard—the black spaces
between the images heightening the different levels the objects operate in
or through, so that they are both an objective sequence and a chain of
thought. Warburg saw his image-albums as deposits, capable of re-igniting
the archaic, Dionysian energies of the original forms.116 Quite apart from
the normative, ongoing concern in art history to produce generalizing or
homogeneous patterns among disparate objects, Warburg’s panels in his
“atlas” serve to emphasize heterogeneity and differences within the appar-
ently identical, illustrating tensions between the various objects and the
different levels of reality they embody. This is true for example when
Warburg is juxtaposing Agnostino di Duccio’s various reliefs in the Tempio
Malastestiano in Rimini, which provide a visit through the temple as well
as the chain of associations in Warburg’s mind as he posits the panel (plate
25 of the work); in this manner the physical construction of the space is
inseparable from the concomitant mental operations that negotiate it, as is
114
Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. p. 251.
115
In another parallel with Artaud, whose drawings were only exhibited some forty years
after his death, Warburg’s Mmenosyne project was not shown as a working whole until an
exhibition in Vienna in 1994, some sixty-five years after his death. The exhibition catalog is
Robert Galitz and Brita Reimers. Eds. Aby M. Warburg: “Ektatische Nymphe—trauernder
Flussgot”: Portrait eines Gelehrten. Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1995.
In 2020 the publisher Hatje Cantz issued a complete fascimile edition—Bilderatlas
MNEMOSYNE: The Original, in conjunction with two exhibitions in Berlin: “Aby Warburg:
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne,” Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 4 September–1 November, 2020, and
“Cosmos and Pathos,” Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 8 August, 2020–2011
January, 2021. For a virtual tour of both exhibitions done in conjunction with the Warburg
Institute, London, go to https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/aby-warburgs-bilderatlas-mnemosyne-
virtual-exhibition?fbclid=IwAR01PeWGcKmbVlWBI7MPosJmF-HFXbSmUhdLmarFSIho
QQmbmz-LNBzQS8I.
Last accessed February 1, 2021.
116
For Warburg’s relation to the German psychologist Richard Semon’s theory of mem-
ory, of memory traces as “engrams,” that could be activated as reproductions of prior events,
see Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. pp. 253–255.
also the case in his collection of images of celestial vaults, globes, and
scene from the adventures of Herakles in plate 2.
Historian Kurt Forster has written of Warburg’s Mnemosyne as a veri-
table “conjuration,” inspired from the Hopi ceremonial altars Warburg
visited in 1895–1896. “Although they are worlds apart,” Forster writes,
“both the altar and the atlas present attempts at order—attempts to pres-
ent, by means of specific objects, the greatest ‘energetic’ relations that
govern the world.”117 Driven by disgust with most art history as a “sterile
trafficking in words,”118 what Warburg found among the Pueblo Indians
was “a desperate attempt at order over and against chaos, not a smiling
and pleasant surrender to the flux of things.”119 The essentials of this are
presented for Warburg in the snake dance of the Oraibi. Rainfall is abso-
lutely a must for the agricultural work of the Indians, hence the impor-
tance of the appearance of lightning—“If lightning appears, hunger will
be banished for this year.”120 The snake shares the form of lightning,
Warburg observes: enigmatic movements without discernible beginning,
middle, or end, also danger. The snake offers maximum of motion, a mini-
mum of graspable surfaces. In the snake rituals, where Indians handled
and held poisonous rattlesnakes, the Indians sought to understand
“through a sheer grasping with the hands, something that in reality eludes
manipulation.”121 If a snake bit an Indian, which occasionally yet rarely
happened, it was not killed, but released into the desert. This sort of
“mimetic appropriation” was an effort to appropriate a natural event
through a living, animate likeness of its form; attracting the lightning, as
it were, drawing it to the tribe, through this sympathetic mimesis. The
contrast for Warburg could not be greater with “modern culture.” Whereas
Indian culture sought to create a relation by sympathetic use of force,
modern culture thrived on distance; instead of a living relationship with
extraordinary natural forces, with modern culture lightning “is drawn into
the ground by an inorganic instrument and eliminated.”122
117
Kurt Forster, “Warburgs Versunkenheit,” in Galitz and Reimers. Aby M. Warburg:
Portrait eines Gelehrten. p. 200. Michaud’s translation.
118
These quotes from a March 14, 1923 letter by Aby Warburg are from the letter pub-
lished in its entirety as an appendix in Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. p. 301.
119
Ibid. p. 305.
120
Ibid. p. 306.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
26 J. MURPHY
In another potent parallel with Artaud, Warburg conceives of the ori-

gins of such “causal” thinking and linkages in the experience of childbirth,
which “links the enigma of a materially determinable interconnection with
the inconceivable catastrophe of separating one creature from another.
The abstract space of thought between subject and object is based on the
experience of the severed umbilical cord.”123 One is reminded of Artaud’s
intense preoccupation with birth and rebirth in the later texts such as
“Execration of the Father-Mother” or “Centre-Mother and Boss-Pussy”
from “Artaud le mômo,” where he ends up exclaiming
But I haven’t entered it

entered this fucked-up jerk-off life
in the fifty years since I’ve been born.124
For Warburg this primordial pain, of which childbirth is merely one

instance, gives rise to the need for totemism, to provide the strength and
efficacy the natives require due to their separation, for their struggle with
nature. What was important to emphasize in the snake rituals was this
“scientific achievement of the so-called savage,” that the representation of
cause can shift back and forth from animal and human being; this is pre-
cisely the subject or the “shape shifting,” the central performative event of
the rattlesnake dance. Warburg found that in such rites, “animals are a
fully magic symbol, compared with which human efforts appear fragmen-
tary and inadequate.”125 In other words, Warburg has grasped the life and
death and cosmological struggle at the root of analogical thinking.
However enthusiastic, Warburg’s description of ‘primitive’ totemism may
still appear unexceptional. It is in what lessons he extrapolated from it that
has the most relevance for Artaud (for Artaud both participates in totem-
ism and explodes it).126
123
Ibid.
124
Ibid.
Artaud XII, 1974, p. 52; translated in Antonin Artaud, Watchfiends and Rack Screams:
Works from the Final Period. Ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman with Bernard Bador. Boston:
Exact Change, 1995. p. 157. The dynamics of Artaud’s re-construction in the asylums is also
centered around birthing and rebirth, eventually producing the phenomenon of Artaud’s
“daughters of the heart, to be born.” For more on the frightful manipulations that begin at
birth, see Artaud XXVI, 1994, pp. 89–91.
125
Warburg in Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. p. 305.
126
This is especially true looking at Artaud’s drawings in the last year-and-a-half of his life.
For discussion of the relation of ‘totemism” to these see the sections on his essay on Van
Warburg’s 1895–1896 visit and communing with the serpent ritual was
decisive for his vision of the Dionysian impulse in Renaissance art; he came
to see Florentine art no longer, as he had under the influence of Jacob
Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, as a historical resolution of different
epochs fused in an eternal recurrence of the will to power, but rather as a
degeneration, that witnessing the Amerindian rituals allowed him to per-
ceive—“He saw the masquerades with their chariots and Lorenzo de’
Medici’s Canti Carnascialeschi as avatars of the dances he had seen on the
mesa.”127 Warburg characterized himself and his researches as an effort to
“diagnose the schizophrenia of Western civilization … the ecstatic
‘Nympha’ (maniac) on the one side and the mourning river-god (depres-
sive) on the other.”128 Inseparable from its motivation as part of an “auto-
biographical reflex,” the Mnemosyne project thus acts as a sort of psychiatric
“cure” for Warburg, as Artaud’s writing, glossolalia, and images also
worked as a kind of “self-analysis” (as Julia Kristeva would have it).129
Through presenting the images in all their contradictory levels of plenti-
tude and motion, Warburg is assembling a rite where intuition and the
body merges with the symbolic. In this he is replicating the experience of
the AmerIndian rites, where the poles of pragmatism, or “sober purpo-
siveness” and symbolism, or “fantastic magic,” are in Warburg’s words
united in that “liberating experience of the boundless communicability
between man and environment.”130
As early as 1893 Warburg had found the image of the snake as a near
universal representation of transitory states, of movement, in the flowing
hair and veils of Botticielli’s nymphs, in Intermedi figures, in the sculpted
panels of Agostino di Duccio. Quite against the famed interpretation of
Johann Winckelmann in 1755 that the sculpture Laocoön in its contrapoise
represented balance and a kind of calm grandeur triumphing over suffer-
ing, in 1905 Warburg referred to it as “gestural pathos” that had found its
fount in the primordial form of writhing serpents.131 When Warburg links
these artistic phenomena to the Pueblo Indian serpent rituals—from the
Gogh and “Artaud’s ‘graphic cruelties’: the face of the void” in chapter VII of Artaud’s
Metamorphosis, especially pp. 240–241.
127
Qtd in Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. p. 239.
128
Qtd in Gombrich. Aby Warburg. p. 303.
129
Julia Kristeva, Talk on Artaud. November 20, 1996. The Drawing Center. New York, NY.
130
Warburg. Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians. p. 2.
131
Aby Warburg. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Trans. David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute, 1999. p. 558.
28 J. MURPHY
Renaissance artists interpreting motion, the group in Laocoön, to the 1589

Intermedi, which portrayed the struggle between Apollo and the serpents
Python, and thus the metamorphosis from bloody sacrifice to representa-
tion—Warburg is including them all as instances of his Pathosformeln. In
the Mnemosyne this “gestural pathos” is loosed from any chronological or
diachronic moorings at all; due to his experience with the Pueblo Indians,
Warburg is insistent on pursuing relations between structures, ceaselessly
modifying and rearranging the forms in their circulation, in a repetition
that has no final meaning or closure as its goal. Having created what he
called “a ghost story for adults,”132 the images isolated on the black cloth
background, what Warburg has conjured as a result of his sojourn in the
American west is a kind of montage, demanding the viewers’ projection
for the dynamic to take place. As Warburg commented in his 1923 lecture
on Indian culture, his photographs are more exercises in composition, in
artistic montage, more concerned with the fact they are photographs and
reproductions than that they depict objects, and so can only be considered
ethnographic documents as a far distant second priority with the author.
There is an example of this in Warburg’s photo of a young Hopi girl
carrying a pot of water on her head. As if inspired by “her otherness
itself,”133 the image links up with the Western canephore in the paintings
of Fra Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Raphael, or any number of others. The
figure of the bird on the pot is like the principle, “the anima,” of the girl
holding it up. The movement here of this stationary creature is brought
about through the association, or connotation, of a sign and a figure. This
is Warburg’s nymph again, but expressed in “an internal, symbolic
form.”134 The two main visual elements and the picture’s philosophy of
montage have produced the movement, here in an concise hieroglyph that
must be read, not just seen.135 Warburg is at one with Artaud, and with
Nietzsche, in linking his activity, this new mode of art history that must be
enacted not interpreted, with a kind of dance, with the art of movement,
Warburg’s “art history without a text”136 was a movement of gesture, like
132
Qtd in Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. p. 242.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid.
135
For Warburg’s description of the “heraldic abstraction” of the bird, see Warburg.
Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians. pp. 7–8. Warburg calls it “an intermediary stage
between a naturalistic image and a sign, between a realistic mirror image and writing.” This
applies as well to Warburg’s own photograph.
136
Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Art of Motion. p. 262.
the Florentine Intermedi spectacles he studied, a “mythological pag-

eant … being an essentially mute and gestural art.”137 Warburg finds this
gestural theater again in the Pueblo Indian rituals; in the appearance of the
Oraibi clown dancers, the shocked Warburg sees the resurrection of the
satyr from the tragic Greek choruses. These masked, often obscene fig-
ures, mime rather than act, much as with Artaud’s Balinese dancers who
are their own double, their own effigy whose power and ‘meaning’ lies not
in their presence as “subjects” but in the intervals of their movements.
The serpent rituals and Oraibi clown dance both confirmed and chal-
lenged Warburg’s intuitions. A similar process occurred during Sergei
Eisenstein’s tumultuous visit to Mexico in 1931. Eisenstein found himself
haunted by what he called “certain supernatural powers, transcending
common sense and human reason.”138 He found this primarily in the pyra-
mid or triangle form, a geometry that would show up in his montages
often without his conscious plans; for Eisenstein this was revealing a meta-
physical order of God, man, and universe beyond ordinary comprehen-
sion. Some of this was inspired by the very first ‘story’ Eisenstein had
intended for his film Qué Viva Mexico (1932) the festival of the Body of
Christ at Tetlapayac where Penitentes enacted Christ’s Journey to Calvalry
and his crucifixion; Eisenstein shot the actual ceremony to which he
attached great significance—the enactment of the transformation of the
bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Eisenstein juxtaposed
this symbolic ceremony—during which one of the penitents went “out of
himself” in a state of ecstasy, with the enacted death of three peasants.
When the peasants buried themselves up to their necks for the scene that
was to be intercut and mixed simultaneously with scenes from the Church
ceremony, Eisenstein found they had done so in the pattern of a triangle,
echoing the crucifixion of Christ scene in the very first sequence. Far more
than a coincidence, Eisenstein was convinced that a primal “truth” was
underlying the composition of the film.139 This happened so often in
Mexico that Eisenstein began to feel he was in the grip of a “supernormal
consciousness.”140
137
Warburg. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. p. 369.
138
Marie Seton. Sergei M. Eisenstein. London: Bodley Head, 1952. p. 205.
139
Ibid. pp. 205–7.
140
Ibid. p. 207.
30 J. MURPHY
This compositional scheme indeed dominates most of Qué Viva Mexico

as it was planned,141 where dialectical thirds move new resolutions onto
new levels, in a process that becomes as much or more cosmic than social
and political. The pyramid form was also to be found all over the quotid-
ian life of Mexico—from the Toltec temples to the shape of the sombrero
or folds of the sarapes, or the custom of having three women sitting guard-
ing the cross at Easter.142 Although in 1933 and 1934 Eisenstein worked
out a formal theory of composition based on and diagramed from these
experiences, he did not publish it, and only fragments from it made it into
his other writings on film aesthetics. It reinforced his view, already empha-
sized in his essay “Beyond the Shot” on the rupture or unity to be found
in the single frame, while it fueled a series of drawings Eisenstein made on
glyphs and signs garnered from the makeshift formalism of life in Mexico,
often overdetermined by the strongly mystical or religious themes of the
stigmata and the crucifixion. Drawn quickly, so as to keep the influence of
“subconscious elements,” Eisenstein drew from mythological themes
ranging from “Werther’s Death” to MacBeth and the story of Salomé and
St. John the Baptist. Visitors to Eisenstein in Mexico were surprised to
find the Marxist filmmaker studying Theresa de Avila.143
All of this is not to affirm some broadly similar dynamic on the level of
personal anecdote—Eisenstein like Artaud attempts to make a more gen-
eral theory from his encounters, an attempt to account for the movement
of image by envoking hieroglyphic forms that have emerged from the rites
141
A reconstruction of how the montage of the film was planned, is contained in Sergei
Eisenstein. Qué Viva Mexico. New York: Arno Press, [1951] 1976. One of the most notori-
ously botched films in film history, owing to Eisenstein’s conflicts with his producer the
American novelist Upton Sinclair, his going wildly over budget, and various difficulties with
the Mexican, U.S., and Soviet authorities, Qué Viva Mexico was only released in various
bowdlerized forms. For an account of this, see Harry M. Geldud and Ronald S. Gottesman.
Sergei Eisensein and Upton Sinclair: Making and Unmaking of “Qué Viva Mexico.” New York/
London: Thames & Hudson, 1970. Eisenstein and Eisenstein in Mexico has been the subject
of recent reevaluations, see Anne Nesbet. Savage Junctures. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003; and
Masha Salazkina. In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009.
142
Seton. Sergei M. Eisenstein. p. 213.
143
Ibid. pp. 216, 213. Some of the drawings were exhibited shortly afterward at John
Becker Gallery in New York, 15 October–7 November, 1932. An excellent account of
Eisenstein in Mexico and the circumstances surrounding his drawings is Inga Karetnikova
with Leon Steinmetz. Mexico According to Eisenstein. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1991.
of indigenous people. Using the same word, “zigzag” that pops up in

Warburg and in Artaud’s art writing in the 1920’s, for Eisenstein the film
strip was a kind of snake, a “zigzag of mimicry that flows over.”144 The
rupture between and inside images was such, Eisenstein wrote in another
essay, that “We are at once reminded of the myths and mysteries of
Dionysus, of Dionysus being torn to pieces and the pieces being reconsti-
tuted as in the transfigured Dionysus. Here we are at the very threshold of
the art of the theater which in time was to become the art of cinema.”145
Eisenstein has hit on here why the cinema for Artaud at one point could
so decisively “pose the problem of expression.”146
Eisenstein found in Mexico, like Artaud among the Tarahumaras or
Warburg with the Pueblos, a kind of primary chaos and flux of form and
ritual that provided a turning point, even if many of his experiences could
not be completely integrated into his next films Alexander Nevsky (1938)
and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958). Next I will turn to a last example,
from poet Charles Olson, unlike Warburg or Eisenstein (who died in the
same year as Artaud) of a younger generation than Artaud, who spent his
time as a civil servant in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in
Washington, D.C. the years Artaud was interned in insane asylums. This
will run the risk of falling into the trap common in Artaud studies, that of
considering Artaud as primarily a writer, a producer of texts, since there
are so many of them, and of such great variety.147 But Olson arguably takes
twentieth century poetics to a new threshold, and one I will show here,
extremely close in its implications to Artaud’s journey that he had navi-
gated in the previous decades.
Hieroglyphs as Fields of Force: Olson’s Origins

In 1952 Charles Olson received grants from the Guggenheim Fellowships
and the Wenner-Gren Foundation to study Mayan hieroglyphs in Mayan
Mesoamerica, and he had applied for grants to study Sumerian and ancient
144
Sergei Eisenstein. Selected Works 1. p. 145.
145
Sergei Eisenstein. Selected Works, Vol. 2. Trans. Michael Glenny. London: BFI,
1988. p. 114.
146
Artaud III, 1961, p. 78.
147
The editor of Artaud’s complete works at Gallimard, Paule Thévenin died in 1993, her
work incomplete despite the publication of some 26 full volumes. As a consequence some of
Artaud’s most important texts, especially from his ‘later’ period, such as “Theater and
Science” and “The Human Face,” are missing from the Oeuvres complètes.
32 J. MURPHY
Middle Eastern languages in Iraq. When living in Washington, D.C. in the

1940’s Olson had been Pound’s informal secretary during part of the
period the latter was interned in the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the
Criminally Insane, judged unfit to stand trial for treason.148 It is safe to say
Olson’s poetics and 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse”149 would not exist
without Pound’s modernist revolution.150 Olson had found, looking at
ancient Sumerian, that it was the need for adequate representation of
proper names that led to phonetization; Olson found this confirmed in
Mayan and Aztec, that used phonetization rarely, and then almost always
in expressing proper names.151 Olson found “The procedure involved may
result in a full phonetic transfer, as in a drawing of knees to express the
name ‘Neil’ (from ‘kneel’), of the sun for the word ‘son,’ or even together
in a drawing of knees plus the sun to express the person name of
‘Neilson.’”152 As in the older forms of Egyptian language, Olson saw that
ancient Mayan was originally pictographic, before developing into a hiero-
glyphic script. Olson’s research had a practical goal, not so dissimilar from
Fenollosa’s that he greatly admired, of reviving poetic language. Olson
gloried in the fact that “all Indo-European language (ours) appears to
stem from the very same ground on which the original agglutinative lan-
guage was invented, Sumeria.”153 So both phonetic and ideographic ele-
ments were present to “and available for use as impetus and explosion in
our alphabetic speech.”154 The movements Olson found in Sumeria he
found confirmed in the Maya, during his sojourn in the Yucatán peninsula
in 1953. Olson is frustrated by prior scholarship on the question of
whether the glyphs indeed constitute a language, although it appears clear
that records such as The Book of Chilam Balam155 and the codices rely on
148
Olson wrote his own “Cantos,” between January 5, 1946 and February 9, 1948, a ten-
part record of his visits with Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, see Catherine Seelye. Ed. Charles Olson
and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeth’s. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975.
pp. 33–93.
149
Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Collected Prose. pp. 239–249.
150
For a look at Olson’s work, especially his engagement with Mayan script, as a direct
continuation of Pound’s Imagism and ideogrammic poetics, see Laszlo Géfin. Ideogram:
History of a Poetic Method. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
151
Olson, “Logography, Collected Prose. p. 184.
152
Ibid.
153
Olson, “The Gate and the Center,” ibid. p. 169.
154
Ibid.
155
Victoria Reifler Brickler and Helga-Maria Miram Ed. and trans. An Encounter of Two
Worlds: The Book of Chilam Bilam from Kaua. New Orleans: Tulane University Middle
an older language or script-system. Olson has no doubt about their

resources as language. In a April 1, 1952 letter to Robert Creeley,
Olson writes:
… What continues to hold me, is, the tremendous levy on all objects as they
present themselves to human sense, in this glyph-world. And the propor-
tion, the distribution of weight given same parts of all, seems, exceptionally,
distributed and accurate, that is, that
sun
moon
venus
other constellations & zodiac
snakes
ticks
vultures
jaguar
owl
frog
feathers
peyote
water-lily
not to speak of
fish
caracol
tortoise
&, above all,
human eyes
hands
limbs (PLUS EXCEEDINGLY
CAREFUL OBSERVA-
TION OF ALL POS-
SIBLE INTERVALS OF
SAME, as well as ALL
ABOVE (to precise di-
mension of eclipses,
American Research Institute, 2002. This collection of texts is written in Yucatec Mayan lan-
guage, in European script, and mostly dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
although some texts included date as far back as the Spanish conquest. Their subjects range
from herbology to prophecy.
34 J. MURPHY
say, & time of, same

etc. etc.)
And the weights of same, each to the other, is, im-

maculate (as well as, full)156
The lesson here for Olson was this realization that “man as object in
field of force declaring self as force because is force in exactly such relation
& can accomplish expression of self as force by conjecture, & displacement
in a context best, now, seen as space more than time as such.”157 The alter-
native was the “mush” of contemporary “humanism” and anthropomor-
phism, producing a “mis-centered” world based on human references. In
contrast even to the greatest literature, that of Homer (for Olson “human-
ism” coming in) and Herman Melville (“humanism” going out), “a Sumer
poem or Mayan glyph is more pertinent to our purposes than anything
else, because each of these people & their workers had forms which
unfolded directly from content (sd content itself a disposition toward real-
ity which understood man as only force in field of force containing mul-
tiple other expressions.”158
Olson’s intuition of a “human universe” now in a “context … seen as
space more than time such,” received another confirmation, much later,
after Olson had finished the bulk of The Maximus Poems that he had begun
in 1950, in the work of Eric Havelock. Reading Havelock’s Preface to
Plato,159 Olson saw renewed positions he had staked out in his 1951 essay
“The Gate and the Center,” and developed in his digs in the Yucatán pen-
insula a year later. The advantage for Olson in going back 2000 years
before Homer and Hesiod to the invention of writing in ancient
Mesopotamia or in investigating the Mayan glyph, was in making writing
a gesture “born from the earth;” this was in part an anti-Aristotelian ges-
ture, and this is what Havelock reinforces in his account of the later Greek
poets; for Havelock the epic is as much the target of Plato’s attack on
poetry in The Republic160 as lyric forms. Olson interprets Plato’s aversion
156
Charles Olson. Mayan Letters. Ed. Robert Creeley. London: Jonathan Cape, [1953]
1968. pp. 66–7.
157
Ibid. p. 67.
158
Ibid. p. 68.
159
Eric Havelock. Preface to Plato. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1963.
160
Plato. The Republic. Trans. Harold Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
to the poets, his invention of a new order of reality, a new episteme that
contradicts them, as the dialectic of Socrates in which Aristotle’s take on
metaphor is already implicit. Aristotle’s notion of metaphor, according to
Olson, is “part or parcel of the Plato-Socrates generalization system,” of
genus, species, and analogy, similarity and dis-similiarity, including the
periodic sentence.161 Following Havelock and the researches of James
A. Notopoulos162 Olson gloried in the proposition that the poetry of
Hesiod and Homer was based on a syntax, a parataxis really, whereby
words and actions are set down side by side in the order of their “occur-
rence in nature, instead of by an order of discourse, or ‘grammar,’ as we
have called, the prior an actual resting on vulgar experience and event.”163
In the epic, according to this reading, there is no nothingness of time,
there are no intervals where nothing happens, and “any one series once
narrated fills up the available time space. There is no while back at the farm
sequence possible.”164 The experience of time in Homer is strictly that of
waiting, of doing nothing—here poetry is free of any concept of time or
chronos other than simply delay or not-doing.165 In other words, and this
was of highest appeal to Olson, who admired and often used the terms
“concretization” and “concrescence” borrowed from Alfred North
Whitehead,166 there was no abstract notion of time in Homer. In Olson’s
view, there was a pre-Aristotelian “condition of discourse” from which
Plato made a dramatic departure, however, “the time now for some time
has been post-Aristotelian.” Proposals to change society were falling flat
161
Olson. “Review of Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato,” Collected Prose. p, 355.
162
James A. Notopoulos, “Parataxis in Homer: A New Approach to Homeric Literary
Criticism,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 80 (1949): 1–23. Havelock
cites this article among others by Notopoulos, and Olson possessed a photocopy of it.
163
Olson. Collected Prose. p. 356.
164
Ibid.
165
Havelock draws on the work of Thaddeus Zielinski and Hermann Ferdinand Fraenkel
for his conception of time in Homer, see Preface to Plato. p. 193 n. 27.
166
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald
W. Sherburne. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, [1929] 1979. Whitehead defined the term
“concrescence” as “the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires
an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination
in the constitution of the novel ‘one.’” Ibid. p. 229. For a link to the digital present, see
Granville C. Henry. Forms of Concrescence: Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy and Computer
Programming Structures. Bucknell: Bucknell University Press, 1993, and importance to cur-
rent theoretical dilemmas, Isabelle Stengers. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild
Creation of Concepts. Trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge: Harvard University Press reprint
ed., 2014.
36 J. MURPHY
for Olson, since “we don’t even know what it does mean to change society
comparably to how they did engage to do it, so much of our discourse is
in fact theirs. Thus social change in the present is boringly social and
unequally revolutionary to theirs.”167
In his lectures of the 1960’s Olson will say that Plato was absolutely
correct in his attack on the poets in that poetry was responsible for mimeti-
cization of experience, yet Olson, in explaining his use of the term episte-
mology, in a talk in 1963, describes it as “the belief … that there is
knowing”—“And it was invented by a man named Plato. Episteme is his
invention and it’s one of the most dangerous inventions in the world—is
the idea that there is such a thing as knowledge.”168 There are at least hints
in such statements that anticipate the far more radical attack on conscious-
ness that will be Artaud’s 1946–1948. In this line of thinking, one could
also imagine that Olson, at least preliminarily, could have found some
compatible searching in Nietzsche and Heidegger, who likewise saw a fork
in the road and false turn with Plato in Western culture, instead of
Whitehead and Jung,169 yet arguably none of these thinkers encompass the
full radicality of Olson’s project in recapturing a primordial sense and sens-
ing of space, if not of time. What Olson was grappling towards is an atti-
tude and ontological stance towards time typical of traditional cultures,
characterized by philosopher José Gil as,
all thinking about time (and the organization of social time according to this
thinking) is found to be subordinated to a tissue of relations among beings.
Far from subordinating the construction of this tissue to a time that is
impossible to control or to think about—a time that would open onto noth-
ingness—traditional thought conditions thinking about time to a series of
relations between things in space.170
167
Olson. Collected Prose. p. 357.
168
Charles Olson. Muthologos: The Collected Lectures and Interviews. Volume 1. Ed. George
F. Butterick. Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1978. p. 29.
169
Olson highly valued Jung’s view of the universe as process, yet felt he diminished this
perception by his use of the word “determinism” and by how he wrote and spoke about
it—“I think he loses the other thing, the Real, by saying it, and involving himself with words
like determinism.” Ibid. For the importance of Jung to Olson, see Charles Stein, The Secret
of the Black Chrysanthemum: The Poetic Cosmology of Charles Olson & His Use of the Writings
of C.G. Jung. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1987.
170
José Gil. Metamorphoses of the Body. Trans. Stephen Muecke. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998. p. 53.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
THE RIVALS
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
’Twas three an’ thirty year ago,

When I was ruther young, you know,
I had my last an’ only fight
About a gal one summer night.
’Twas me an’ Zekel Johnson; Zeke
’N’ me ’d be’n spattin’ ’bout a week,
Each of us tryin’ his best to show
That he was Liza Jones’s beau.
We couldn’t neither prove the thing,
Fur she was fur too sharp to fling
One over fur the other one
An’ by so doin’ stop the fun
That we chaps didn’t have the sense
To see she got at our expense.
But that’s the way a feller does,
Fur boys is fools an’ allus was;
An’ when they’s females in the game
I reckon men’s about the same.
Well, Zeke an’ me went on that way
An’ fussed an’ quarreled day by day;
While Liza, mindin’ not the fuss,
Jest kep’ a-goin’ with both of us,
Tell we pore chaps, that’s Zeke an’ me,
Was jest plum mad with jealousy.
Well, fur a time we kep’ our places,
An’ only showed by frownin’ faces
An’ looks ’at well our meanin’ boded
How full o’ fight we both was loaded.
At last it come, the thing broke out,
An’ this is how it come about.
One night (’twas fair, you’ll all agree)
I got Eliza’s company,
An’ leavin’ Zekel in the lurch,
Went trottin’ off with her to church.
An’ jest as we had took our seat,
(Eliza lookin’ fair an’ sweet),
Why, I jest couldn’t help but grin
When Zekel come a-bouncin’ in
As furious as the law allows.
He’d jest be’n up to Liza’s house,
To find her gone, then come to church
To have this end put to his search.
I guess I laffed that meetin’ through,
An’ not a mortal word I knew
Of what the preacher preached er read
Er what the choir sung er said.
Fur every time I’d turn my head
I couldn’t skeercely help but see
’At Zekel had his eye on me.
An’ he ’ud sort o’ turn an’ twist
An’ grind his teeth an’ shake his fist.
I laughed, fur la! the hull church seen us,
An’ knowed that suthin’ was between us.
Well, meetin’ out, we started hum,
I sorter feelin’ what would come.
We’d jest got out, when up stepped Zeke,
An’ said, “Scuse me, I’d like to speak
To you a minute.” “Cert,” said I—
A-nudgin’ Liza on the sly
An’ laughin’ in my sleeve with glee,
I asked her, please, to pardon me.
We walked away a step er two,
Jest to git out o’ Liza’s view,
An’ then Zeke said, “I want to know
Ef you think you’re Eliza’s beau,
An’ ’at I’m goin’ to let her go
Hum with sich a chap as you?”
An’ I said bold, “You bet I do.”
Then Zekel, sneerin’, said ’at he
Didn’t want to hender me,
But then he ’lowed the gal was his
An’ ’at he guessed he knowed his biz,
An’ wasn’t feared o’ all my kin
With all my friends an’ chums throwed in.
Some other things he mentioned there
That no born man could no ways bear
Er think o’ ca’mly tryin’ to stan’
Ef Zeke had be’n the bigges’ man
In town, an’ not the leanest runt
’At time an’ labor ever stunt.
An’ so I let my fist go “bim.”
I thought I’d mos’ nigh finished him.
But Zekel didn’t take it so.
He jest ducked down an’ dodged my blow
An’ then come back at me so hard,
I guess I must ’a’ hurt the yard,
Er spilet the grass plot where I fell,
An’ sakes alive it hurt me; well,
It wouldn’t be’n so bad you see,
But he jest kep’ a-hittin’ me.
An’ I hit back an’ kicked an’ pawed,
But ’t seemed ’twas mostly air I clawed,
While Zekel used his science well
A-makin’ every motion tell.
He punched an’ hit, why, goodness lands,
Seemed like he had a dozen hands.
Well, afterwhile, they stopped the fuss,
An’ some one kindly parted us.
All beat an’ cuffed an’ clawed an’ scratched,
An’ needin’ both our faces patched,
Each started hum a different way;
An’ what o’ Liza, do you say,
Why, Liza—little humbug—darn her,
Why, she’d gone home with Hiram Turner.
—Copyright by Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, and used by special
arrangement.
THE FIRST FURROW
By James J. Montague
Don’t you ever feel a yearnin’, ’long about this time o’ year,
For a robin’s song to tell you that the summer time is near?
Don’t you ever sort o’ hanker for the blackbird’s whistlin’ call,
Echoin’ through the hillside orchard, where the blossoms used to
fall?
Don’t you wish that you were out there, breathin’ in the April air,
Full o’ glad an’ careless boyhood, an’ with strength an’ health to
spare?
Don’t it hurt you to remember, when the springtime comes around,
How the first, long, rollin’ furrow used to wake the sleepy ground?
How’d you like to take the children, born to dirty city streets,
Out to where the brook goes pulsin’ when the heart o’ nature beats?
How’d you like to watch ’em wonder at the boomin’ of the bees,
Or to see ’em dodge the petals that are snowin’ from the trees?
How’d you like to see their faces catch the color o’ the rose,
As they raced across the meadow where the earliest crocus grows?
Wouldn’t it be joy to watch ’em follow on behind the plow,
As it cut the first brown furrow, like it’s doin’ out there now?
SUNSHINE
By Fred Emerson Brooks
Some people have the sunshine,

While others have the rain;
But God don’t change the weather
Because the folks complain.
Don’t waste your time in grumbling,
Nor wrinkle up your brow;
Some other soul has trouble,
Most likely has it now.
When nature lies in shadow,

On damp and cloudy days,
Don’t blame the sun, good people,
But loan a few bright rays.
The sun is always shining
Above the misty shroud,
And if your world be murky,
The fault lies in the cloud.
Take sunshine to your neighbor,

In all you do and say;
Have sunshine in your labor,
And sunshine in your play.
Where’er the storm-cloud lowers,
Take in the sunlight glow,
And Heaven will show what flowers
From seeds of kindness grow.
—Copyright by Forbes & Co., Chicago, and used by kind

permission of author and publisher.
“CICELY”
ALKALI STATION
By Bret Harte
Cicely says you’re a poet: maybe; I ain’t much on rhyme:

I reckon you’d give me a hundred, and beat me every time.
Poetry!—that’s the way some chaps puts up an idee,
But I takes mine “straight without sugar,” and that’s what’s the matter
with me.
Poetry!—just look round you,—alkali, rock, and sage;

Sage-brush, rock, and alkali; ain’t it a pretty page!
Sun in the east at mornin’, sun in the west at night,
And the shadow of this ’yer station the on’y thing moves in sight.
Poetry!—Well now—Polly! Polly run to your mam;

Run right away, my pooty! By by! Ain’t she a lamb?
Poetry!—that reminds me o’ suthin’ right in that suit:
Jest shet that door thar, will yer?—for Cicely’s ears is cute.
Ye noticed Polly,—the baby? A month afore she was born,

Cicely—my old woman—was moody-like and forlorn;
Out of her head and crazy, and talked of flowers and trees;
Family man yourself, sir? Well, you know what a woman be’s.
Narvous she was, and restless,—said that she “couldn’t stay,”

Stay,—and the nearest woman seventeen miles away.
But I fixed it up with the doctor, and he said he would be on hand,
And I kinder stuck by the shanty, and fenced in that bit o’ land.
One night,—the tenth of October,—I woke with a chill and fright,

For the door it was standing open, and Cicely warn’t in sight,
But a note was pinned on the blanket, which said that she “couldn’t
stay,”
But had gone to visit her neighbor,—seventeen miles away.
When and how she stampeded, I didn’t wait for to see,

For out in the road, next minit, I started as wild as she:
Running first this way and that way, like a hound that is off the scent,
For there warn’t no track in the darkness to tell me the way she went.
I’ve had some mighty mean moments afore I kem to this spot,—
Lost on the plains in ’50, drowned almost, and shot;
But out on this alkali desert, a hunting a crazy wife,
Was ra’ly as on-satis-factory as anything in my life.
“Cicely! Cicely! Cicely!” I called, and I held my breath,

And “Cicely!” came from the canyon,—and all was as still as death.
And “Cicely! Cicely! Cicely!” came from the rocks below,
And jest but a whisper of “Cicely!” down from them peaks of snow.
I ain’t what you call religious,—but I jest looked up to the sky,

And—this ’yer’s to what I’m coming, and maybe ye think I lie:
But up away to the east’ard, yaller and big and far,
I saw of a suddent rising the singlerist kind of star.
Big and yaller and dancing, it seemed to beckon to me:
Yaller and big and dancing, such as you never see:
Big and yaller and dancing,—I never saw such a star,
And I thought of them sharps in the Bible, and I went for it then and
thar.
Over the brush and bowlders I stumbled and pushed ahead:

Keeping the star afore me, I went wharever it led.
It might hev been for an hour, when suddent and peart and nigh,
Out of the yearth afore me thar riz up a baby’s cry.
Listen! thar’s the same music; but her lungs they are stronger now
Than the day I packed her and her mother,—I’m derned if I jest know
how.
But the doctor kem the next minit, and the joke o’ the whole thing is
That Cis. never knew what happened from that very night to this!
But Cicely says you’re a poet, and maybe you might, some day,
Jest sling her a rhyme ’bout a baby that was born in a curious way,
And see what she says; but, old fellow, when you speak of the star,
don’t tell
As how ’twas the doctor’s lantern,—for maybe ’twon’t sound so well.
—Copyright by Houghton Mifflin & Co., Boston, and used by their

kind permission.
AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE

By Alice Cary
O good painter, tell me true,

Has your hand the cunning to draw
Shapes of things that you never saw?
Ay? Well, here is an order for you.
Woods and cornfields, a little brown,—

The picture must not be over-bright,—
Yet all in the golden and gracious light
Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down.
Alway and alway, night and morn,

Woods upon woods, with fields of corn
Lying between them, not quite sere,
And not in the full thick, leafy bloom,
When the wind can hardly find breathing-room
Under their tassels,—cattle near,
Biting shorter the short green grass,
And a hedge of sumach and sassafras,
With bluebirds twittering all around,—
(Ah, good painter, you can’t paint sound)—
These and the house where I was born,
Low and little, and black and old,
With children, many as it can hold,
All at the windows, open wide,—
Heads and shoulders clear outside,
And fair young faces all ablush:
Perhaps you may have seen, some day,
Roses crowding the selfsame way,
Out of a wilding, wayside bush.
Listen closer. When you have done
With woods and cornfields and grazing herds,
A lady, the loveliest ever the sun
Looked down upon, you must paint for me;
Oh, if I only could make you see
The clear blue eyes, the tender smile,
The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace,
The woman’s soul, and the angel’s face
That are beaming on me all the while!—
I need not speak these foolish words:
Yet one word tells you all I would say,—
She is my mother: you will agree
That all the rest may be thrown away.
Two little urchins at her knee

You must paint, sir: one like me,—
The other with a clearer brow,
And the light of his adventurous eyes
Flashing with boldest enterprise:
At ten years old he went to sea,—
God knoweth if he be living now,—
He sailed in the good ship Commodore,—
Nobody ever crossed her track
To bring us news, and she never came back.
Ah, ’tis twenty long years and more
Since that old ship went out of the bay
With my great-hearted brother on her deck;
I watched him till he shrank to a speck,
And his face was toward me all the way.
Bright his hair was, a golden brown,
The time we stood at our mother’s knee:
That beauteous head, if it did go down,
Carried sunshine into the sea.
Out in the fields one summer night

We were together, half afraid
Of the corn leaves rustling, and of the shade
Of the high hills, stretching so far and still,—
Loitering till after the low little light
Of the candle shone through the open door,
And over the haystack’s pointed top,
All of a tremble, and ready to drop,
The first half-hour, the great yellow star
That we with staring, ignorant eyes,
Had often and often watched to see
Propped and held in its place in the skies
By the fork of a tall, red mulberry tree,
Which close in the edge of our flax-field grew,—
Dead at the top—just one branch full
Of leaves, notched round, and lined with wool,
From which it tenderly shook the dew
Over our heads, when we came to play
In its handbreadth of shadow, day after day:—
Afraid to go home, sir; for one of us bore
A nest full of speckled and thin-shelled eggs,—
The other, a bird held fast by the legs,
Not so big as a straw of wheat:
The berries we gave her she wouldn’t eat,
But cried and cried, till we held her bill,
So slim and shining, to keep her still.
ONE, TWO, THREE

By Henry C. Bunner
It was an old, old, old, old lady,

And a boy who was half-past three,
And the way that they played together
Was beautiful to see.
She couldn’t go running and jumping,

And the boy, no more could he;
For he was a thin little fellow,
With a thin little twisted knee.
They sat in the yellow sunlight,

Out under the maple tree;
And the game that they played I’ll tell you,
Just as it was told to me.
It was hide-and-go-seek they were playing,

Though you’d never have known it to be—
With an old, old, old, old lady,
And a boy with a twisted knee.
The boy would bend his face down

On his one little sound right knee,
And he’d guess where she was hiding,
In guesses One, Two, Three.
“You are in the china closet!”

He would cry, and laugh with glee.
It wasn’t the china closet;
But he still had Two and Three.
“You are up in papa’s big bedroom,

In the chest with the queer old key!”
And she said: “You are warm and warmer;
But you’re not quite right,” said she.
“It can’t be the little cupboard

Where Mamma’s things used to be,
So it must be the clothespress, Gran’ma!”
And he found her with his Three.
Then she covered her face with her fingers,

That were wrinkled and white and wee,
And she guessed where the boy was hiding,
With a One and a Two and a Three.
And they never had stirred from their places,

Right under the maple tree—
This old, old, old, old lady,
And the boy with a lame little knee;
This dear, dear, dear old lady,
And the boy who was half-past three.
RECIPROCITY
By H. Bedford-Jones
Would you have men play square with you,

Play fair with you, and bear with you
In all the little weaknesses so easy to condemn?
Then simply try to do the same—
Hold up your head and play the game,
And when the others are to blame
Be sure to bear with them!
Would you have men, when new to you,
Be true to you and do to you
The things that faith and brother-love and nothing else impel?
Then give them faith and brother-love
And set sincerity above
All other things—and it will prove
That you have builded well!
THE YOUNG TRAMP

By Chas. F. Adams
Hello, thar, stranger! Whar yer frum?

Come in and make yerself ter hum!
We’re common folks, ain’t much on style;
Come in and stop a little while;
’Twon’t do no harm ter rest yer some.
Youngster, yer pale, and don’t look well!

What, way from Bosting? Naow, dew tell!
Why, that’s a hundred mile or so;
What started yer, I’d like ter know,
On sich a tramp; got goods ter sell?
No home, no friends? Naow that’s too bad!

Wall, cheer up, boy, and don’t be sad,—
Wife, see what yer can find ter eat,
And put the coffee on ter heat,—
We’ll fix yer up all right, my lad.
Willing ter work, can’t git a job,

And not a penny in yer fob?
Wall, naow, that’s rough, I dew declare!
What, tears? Come, youngster, I can’t bear
Ter see yer take on so, and sob.
How came yer so bad off, my son?

Father was killed? ’Sho’; whar? Bull Run?
Why, I was in that scrimmage, lad,
And got used up, too, pretty bad;
I shan’t forgit old ’sixty-one!
So yer were left in Bosting, hey!

A baby when he went away?
Those Bosting boys were plucky, wife,
Yer know one of ’em saved my life,
Else I would not be here to-day.
’Twas when the “Black Horse Cavalcade”

Swept down on our small brigade,
I got the shot that made me lame,
When down on me a trooper came,
And this ’ere chap struck up his blade.
Poor feller! He was stricken dead;

The trooper’s sabre cleaved his head.
Joe Billings was my comrade’s name,
He was a Bosting boy, and game!
I almost wished I’d died, instead.
Why, lad! what makes yer tremble so?

Your father! what, my comrade Joe?
And you his son? Come ter my heart.
My home is yours; I’ll try in part,
Ter pay his boy the debt I owe.
HULLO!
By Sam Walter Foss
When you see a man in woe,

Walk straight up and say, “Hullo!”
Say “Hullo!” and “How d’ye do?
How’s the world been using you?”
Slap the fellow on his back,
Bring your hand down with a whack!
Waltz straight up and don’t go slow,
Shake his hand and say “Hullo!”
Is he clothed in rags? Oh, ho.

Walk straight up and say “Hullo!”
Rags are but a cotton roll
Just for wrapping up a soul;
And a soul is worth a true
Hale and hearty “How d’ye do?”
Don’t wait for the crowd to go.
Walk straight up and say “Hullo!”
When big vessels meet, they say,

They salute and sail away;
Just the same as you and me,
Lonely ships upon the sea,
Each one sailing his own jog
For a port beyond the fog;
Let your speaking trumpet blow,
Lift your horn and cry, “Hullo!”
Say “Hullo!” and “How d’ye do?”

Other folks are good as you.
When you leave your house of clay,
Wandering in the far away,
When you travel through the strange
Country far beyond the range,
Then the souls you’ve cheered will know
Who you be, and say “Hullo!”
COLUMBUS
By Arthur Hugh Clough
How in heaven’s name did Columbus get over,

Is a pure wonder to me, I protest,
Cabot, and Raleigh, too, that well-read rover,
Frobisher, Dampier, Drake, and the rest;
Bad enough all the same,
For them that after came;
But in great heaven’s name,
How he should think
That on the other brink
Of this wild waste, terra firma should be,
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me.
How a man should ever hope to get thither,

E’en if he knew that there was another side;
But to suppose he should come any whither,
Sailing straight on into chaos untried,
In spite of the motion,
Across the whole ocean,
To stick to the notion
That in some nook or bend
Of a sea without end,
He should find North and South America,
Was a pure madness, indeed, I must say.
What if wise men had, as far back as Ptolemy,

Judged that the earth like an orange was round,
None of them ever said, Come along, follow me,
Sail to the West, and the East will be found.
Many a day before
Ever they’d come ashore
Sadder and wiser men,
They’d have turned back again;
And that he did not, but did cross the sea,
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me.
—Copyright by Macmillan & Co., New York, and used by

arrangement.
THE USUAL WAY

Anonymous
There was once a little man, and his rod and line he took,
For he said, “I’ll go a-fishing in the neighboring brook.”
And it chanced a little maiden was walking out that day,
And they met—in the usual way.
Then he sat down beside her, and an hour or two went by,
But still upon the grassy brink his rod and line did lie;
“I thought,” she shyly whispered, “you’d be fishing all the day!”
And he was—in the usual way.
So he gravely took his rod in hand and threw the line about,
But the fish perceived distinctly he was not looking out;
And he said, “Sweetheart, I love you,” but she said she could not
stay,
But she did—in the usual way.
Then the stars came out above them, and she gave a little sigh
As they watched the silver ripples like the moments running by;
“We must say good-by,” she whispered by the alders old and gray.
And they did—in the usual way.
And day by day beside the stream, they wandered to and fro,
And day by day the fishes swam securely down below,
Till this little story ended, as such little stories may,
Very much—in the usual way.
And now that they are married, do they always bill and coo?
Do they never fret and quarrel, like other couples do?
Does he cherish her and love her? Does she honor and obey?
Well, they do—in the usual way.
HUMOROUS SELECTIONS IN POETRY
LITTLE MISS STUDY AND LITTLE MISS PLAY

Little Miss Study and little Miss Play,

Each came to the school from an opposite way;
While little Miss Study could always recite,
This little Miss Play hardly ever was right;
For little Miss Study found she could do more
By learning her lessons the evening before;
But, fond of a frolic, this little Miss Play
Would put off her lessons until the next day.
At the head of her class Miss Study was put,
While little Miss Play had to stay at the foot!
Thus little Miss Study and little Miss Play
Went onward through life—in an opposite way.
—Copyright by Forbes & Co., Chicago, and used by kind

permission of author and publisher.
A SIMILAR CASE
Anonymous
Jack, I hear you’ve gone and done it,—

Yes, I know; most fellows will;
Went and tried it once myself, sir,
Though you see I’m single still.
And you met her—did you tell me—
Down at Newport, last July,
And resolved to ask the question
At a soiree?—So did I.
I suppose you left the ball-room,

With its music and its light;
For they say Love’s flame is brightest
In the darkness of the night.
Well, you walked along together,
Overhead, the starlit sky;
And I’ll bet—old man, confess it—
You were frightened.—So was I.
So you strolled along the terrace,

Saw the summer moonlight pour,
All its radiance on the waters,
As they rippled on the shore,
Till at length you gathered courage,
When you saw that none was nigh—
Did you draw her close and tell her,
That you loved her?—So did I.
Well, I needn’t ask you further,

And I’m sure I wish you joy,
Think I’ll wander down and see you
When you’re married,—eh, my boy?
When the honeymoon is over
And you’re settled down, we’ll try—
What? The deuce you say! Rejected?
You rejected?—So was I.
IRISH CASTLES
By Fitz-James O’Brien
“Sweet Norah, come here, and look into the fire;

Maybe in its embers good luck we might see;
But don’t come too near, or your glances so shining,
Will put it clean out, like the sunbeams, machree!
“Just look ’twixt the sods, where so brightly they’re burning,

There’s a sweet little valley, with rivers and trees,
And a house on the bank, quite as big as the squire’s—
Who knows but some day we’ll have something like these?
“And now there’s a coach and four galloping horses,

A coachman to drive, and a footman behind;
That betokens some day we will keep a fine carriage,
And dash through the streets with the speed of the wind.”
As Dermot was speaking, the rain down the chimney,

Soon quenched the turf-fire on the hollowed hearth-stone:
While mansion and carriage, in smoke-wreaths evanished,
And left the poor dreamer dejected and lone.
Then Norah to Dermot, these words softly whispered:

“’Tis better to strive than to vainly desire:
And our little hut by the roadside is better
Than palace, and servants, and coach—in the fire!”
’Tis years since poor Dermot his fortune was dreaming—

Since Norah’s sweet counsel effected its cure;
For, ever since then hath he toiled night and morning,
And now his snug mansion looks down on the Suir.
THE DEACON’S DRIVE

Good Deacon Jones, although a pious man,

Was not constructed on the meager plan;
And he so loved the Sabbath day of rest,
Of all the seven deemed it far the best;
Could he have made the year’s allotment o’er,
He would have put in many rest-days more.
One Sunday morn, on sacred matters bent,
With his good wife, to church the deacon went.
And since there was no fear of being late,
The horse slow jogged along his Sunday gait.
This horse he got by trading with a Jew,
And called him Moses,—nothing else would do.
He’d been a race-horse in his palmy days,
But now had settled down, to pious ways,—
Save now and then backsliding from his creed,
When overtempted to a burst of speed.
’Twas early, and the deacon’s wife was driving,

While from the book the deacon hard was striving
On sacred things to concentrate his mind—
The sound of clattering hoofs is heard behind;
Old Mose pricked up his ears and sniffed the air;
The deacon mused: “Some racers, I declare!
Fast horse, fast man, fast speeds the life away,
While sluggish blood is slow to disobey!”
He closed the book; he’d read enough of psalms—
And, looking backward, spat upon his palms,
Then grabbed the sagging reins: “Land sakes alive!
It’s late, Jerushee, guess I’d better drive!”
The wife suspects there’s something on his mind;

Adjusts her spectacles and looks behind:
“Pull out, good Silas, let that sinner past
Who breaks the Sabbath day by drivin’ fast!
What pretty horses; he’s some city chap;
My, how he drives; he’ll meet with some mishap!
Be quick thar, Silas; further to the side;
He’s comin’; thank the Lord the road is wide!
Jes’ look at Mose; if he ain’t in fer war!
Say, Silas, what on earth you bracin’ for?
Old man, have you forgot what day it is?”
“Git up thar, Mose! Jerushee, mind yer biz!”
“Upon my soul, look how that nag’s a-pacin’;
Why, Silas, dear, I do believe you’re racin’!
Land sakes alive, what will the people say?
Good Deacon Jones a-racin’, Sabbath day!”
“Jerushee, now you hold yer pious tongue,

New Media and The Artaud Effect Jay Murphy Full Chapter

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New Media and the Artaud Effect Jay

“Jay Murphy deftly excavates Antonin Artaud’s capacious visionary

“Approaching Artaud through the framing of hieroglyphics, Murphy’s

New Media and the

ISBN 978-3-030-83487-6 ISBN 978-3-030-83488-3 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following, where portions of this

I owe gratitude to Lauriane Piette and her staff at Palgrave Macmillan

Susberg, Oloye Bafagunwa Awo Agbaye, Elena Bondal, Oana Aitchison,

2 The Power of Capture 51

3 Beyond Hieroglyphics: I 87

4 Beyond Hieroglyphics: II119

5 Don’t Forget the Virtual151

Up to a certain point, Antonin Artaud’s search for hieroglyphic keys to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

psychoanalyst judged “absolutely unique,”3 would already make his

Journalist Maurice Saillet described Artaud’s performance in this way,

André Breton’s comment that at Vieux-Colombier Artaud had reduced

A Universe and a Theater of Signs

the Tarahumaras—Artaud at times pierced the veils he perceived. And his

Certainly, there are no symbols in the spectacle of Jean-Louis Barrault. And

It has no such extension or range, according to Artaud, since is “only

ceremonies of shamans or “witch doctors,” already contradicting himself in the

Artaud acclaims theater while suggesting that it doesn’t probe to the

of Egyptian ankhs deployed in files; and the doors of Tarahumara houses

In the mountains of the Tarahumaras, Artaud felt he had found, among

I studied at length the Gods of Mexico in the Codices, and it appeared to

These “holes of shadows” sound very much like the “hieroglyphs” in

This fascination with what he saw as the immediately expressive and

hieroglyphic language people perceive differently, or in some more holistic

It could be said Artaud is succumbing to the temptation, not of oppos-

or cube, in recommending that in the examination of any matter, one

Shedding Light on Hieroglyphic Language:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

Pound’s well-known poem, inspired from his study of Japanese hokku,

Mayakovsky does not work in lines:

Fenollosa and Pound often emphasized the addition, damage, or change

of the figures separated by black space like a film storyboard as in Aby

a dog and a mouth mean “to bark

Although this sounds identical to Eisenstein’s Russian compatriot Les

independent signifier of “representation which cannot be represented,” a “filmic quality”

seen as forming dialectical wholes or a ““spiral,” even if not the bourgeois

constitution and dissolution of the cinematic hieroglyphic remains in fact

The wealth of composition in characters makes possible a choice of words in

The enthusiastic Pound, who in his celebrated definition of “Imagism”

Chinese language, had so little to do with the thrust of his argument—

it is true that the pronunciation varies endlessly through uncountable dia-

Leibniz in the 1670’s was classing Chinese language as a system of

the ‘collective unconscious’ for a Jungian interpreter,100 is not on the order

cosmological transformation indeed smacks of Artaud in manifold ways.

Aby Warburg’s Expressivity without Subject

where knowledge is transformed into a cosmological configuration and

In another potent parallel with Artaud, Warburg conceives of the ori-

But I haven’t entered it

For Warburg this primordial pain, of which childbirth is merely one

Renaissance artists interpreting motion, the group in Laocoön, to the 1589

the Florentine Intermedi spectacles he studied, a “mythological pag-

This compositional scheme indeed dominates most of Qué Viva Mexico

of indigenous people. Using the same word, “zigzag” that pops up in

Hieroglyphs as Fields of Force: Olson’s Origins

Middle Eastern languages in Iraq. When living in Washington, D.C. in the

an older language or script-system. Olson has no doubt about their

say, & time of, same

2 The Power of Capture 51

3 Beyond Hieroglyphics: I 87

4 Beyond Hieroglyphics: II119

5 Don’t Forget the Virtual151