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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
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
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translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
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electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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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:
[20] Well employed.
[21] Sir Francis Burdett.
Hd. Quarters, Fornos D’Algodres, May 23, 1810.

My Dear Ellen,
As you desire to hear from me immediately I will not lose a
moment in thanking you for your dear letter of the 15th and 24th
April, and for your affectionate kind wishes on my birthday....
We have been in this Quarter near a month and most heartily tired
of it. It is a miserable little village on the side of a very high mountain,
opposite to the famous mountains of the Estrella, and about a mile
from the river Mondego, and 8 from Celorico the Hd. Qrs. of Lord
Wellington.
I have lately changed my abode, as in the last the rain ran in upon
my bed, and we were three in a very small room with one window
without a pane of glass. Indeed in the whole of the Marshal’s
Quarters there are but 6 in one window. We only had one bason and
one jug, and you may imagine the squabbling as to who was to wash
first. I have deposed some silkworms from my present room, and
have at least the luxury of being alone, and having a broken pewter
bason, none of the cleanest, to myself. There’s luxury for you! The
rain however, which has been incessant for the last 3 months or
more, has found its way in, and runs in tolerable streams in four
parts of my dismal abode. My bed escapes, and my bason and some
broken jars catch water. Therefore I am rather well off.
At the General’s, my last Quarter, we had 7 or 8 grown up young
ladies, des grands du Village, the most affected stupid misses I ever
met with in any barbarous country. They never were three miles from
home, and ape notwithstanding from hearsay what they fancy great
people should do. They think me I believe very proud, and the young
ladies are mighty shy. I am not, however, quite safe from the attacks
of a maiden aunt of 30 to 40 with little cat’s eyes and bad teeth. I
think she will find I am bomb-proof to her kind looks and sighs. She
has already begun to try what disdain will do, to my great joy and
amusement. You would be much entertained to see us assemble at
breakfast and dinner, near 20 people. We have succeeded at last in
making them wash their hands and faces, and if we remain long
enough no doubt will also attain the desideratum of combing their
hair, even for breakfast, or rather before breakfast, and once or twice
a week, oftener than on Sunday morning.
Public news I have none to tell you, except the arrival of Masséna
to command the army of Portugal, which is between Ciudad Rodrigo
and Salamanca. He is a very clever enterprising Officer, and will
soon give us something to do, I have no doubt, but we are not at all
afraid of him, as our troops both English and Portuguese are in the
highest spirits, and the latter so much improved that they hardly
know themselves again. I have no doubt they will do their duty, but
should wish to break them in by degrees....
Ever yr. most affectionate Brother,
Wm. W.
Extract from a Letter of Thomas Warre

London, June 20, 1810.
My Dear Father,
I write these few lines to inform you I this morning received a long
letter from William, from Fornos d’Algodres, June 6th, the same
place they were in before. He is very well and writes in very good
spirits. They have had dreadful bad weather by continual rains.
The French have invested Ciudad Rodrigo closer, but William
thinks before they attack that place, they will drive in our advance
corps, General Crawfurd’s Division, which overlooks their operations,
and should they succeed in driving them in, Beresford’s forces must
retire to concentrate. But William does not expect they will succeed,
not being in sufficient force. He still speaks favourably of the native
troops, who are kept a good deal on the alert. They have lately had
great feasting. Ld. Wellington on the 4th inst. gave a dinner to
Beresford, which was returned by him, and all went off remarkably
well.
William has again written to poor Clara, but fears nothing he can
urge will induce her to move at present. I lament it exceedingly....
On getting to Throgmorton St. I found a few lines from Capt.
Hardy. The date is 28th of May off Fernesen in the Gt. Belt. He
merely says that he is quite well, and that they are proceeding on to
the Baltic, that is the St George, Formidable, Stately and Resolution,
and that nothing had occurred worth noticing.
Extract from a Letter of Thomas Warre

Hendon Place, July 8, 1810.
[I deferred writing to you as I expected to find letters in town from
Wm., which we did of 13th June.]
He wrote as usual in great spirits, but the crisis of their fate
approaches. The French had completed their bridges across the
Agueda, so Cd. Rodrigo was invested, but their heavy artillery had
stuck in the mud near Tamames, somewhere between Salamanca
and C. Rodrigo. They have three Corps d’Armée, viz.: Junot, Ney,
and Regnier’s, which is opposed to Genl. Hill to the Southward. Their
force he supposes to be 60 to 70,000, very sick and discontented.
Much will depend on their first sweep, but if the Portuguese troops
fulfil the promise they give at present, he has no doubt they shall
give them a good licking. Ld. Wellington’s Hd. Qrs. were at Celorico.
The front of the allied army extended from Pinhel to Guarda. Adv. gd.
at Gallegos, 2 leagues from C. Rodrigo and the advanced Picket at
Marialva, close to the French outposts. I saw Col. Ross yesterday.
He has exchanged into the 48th; both Batts. of which are in Portugal
in Genl. Hill’s Division. He had seen a letter from Ld. Wellington to
one of Mrs Ross’s Brothers. He writes in great spirits. My Father
likewise saw a letter yesterday from General Off. of high rank, who
said that their position was an excellent one, and that the C. in. C.
has made the most judicious arrangements. All this is very good as
far as it goes, but I shall look for the next arrivals with much anxious
impatience.
Hd. Qrs., Fornos D’Algodres, June 20, 1810.

My Dear Father,
I am sorry to tell you that the Marshal has not yet received any
answer from the Government respecting the admission of Rice and
Grain free of duty; and I begin to fear that their usual narrow and
absurd policy opposes more obstacles to this very desirable object
than was at first expected. Indeed, if so, nothing can be more
absurd, as although the harvest promises very well, particularly Rice
and Barley, owing to the uncommon lateness of the season, the
Indian corn is in most places but just sown, and in many not yet.
Much must therefore depend upon the dryness of the latter end of
the Autumn, and before that I think the scarcity will be so great, that
they will be forced, though late, to open their ports, and give every
encouragement to importation, or starve. The men and oxen have
been kept away from their agricultural pursuits, to attend the armies
with their carts, and this has delayed and impeded very much the
ploughing, and hoeing, and reaping, as has also in some degree the
very great consumption of cattle. The moment the Marshal gets an
answer I will write to you, and to Porto to Pedro Alvez, which I have
not done hitherto, because in the first place I could tell him nothing
decisive, and in the next, it appeared to me prudent that it should be
kept quite a secret that such an allowance in point of duties was in
agitation.
The weather has at last set in very hot, which I hope will increase
the great sickness of the French, who have been mostly exposed to
the continued rains we have had till now. Our people, both English
and Portuguese, are getting into the most satisfactory state of health,
having been under cover and quiet.
The Enemy continues almost in statu quo. They have completed
their bridges over the Agueda at Val d’Espino, and covered them by
a small tête de pont. By their means the investment of Ciudad
Rodrigo is completed. Their heavy Artillery and Mortars are, I
believe, still fast in the mud half-way to Salamanca, but this hot
weather will now soon enable them to bring them up. After which I
have no idea that Ciudad Rodrigo can hold out a fortnight, from its
construction, which is completely irregular and very defective,
besides being in some degree commanded at about 800 yards. This
will probably be the prelude to our play, and then we shall all become
actors. They seem very shy of us, and I do not believe have as yet
completed their preparations, or collected a sufficient force to attack
us. Their foreigners continue to desert in considerable numbers, and
more would I am sure come over, but for the steps the French have
taken to prevent them. Our advanced Picquets have frequent
skirmishes with them, which lead to nothing but wounding a few men
and horses on each side.
We went over two days ago to Francozo to inspect a Portuguese
Brigade with Lord Wellington, and afterwards to Minucal (?) to see
the 16th Lt. Dgns., who are in very fine order, and made a most
excellent review. At Francozo we visited the Nuns. The Porteress
gave Lord Wellington, etc., etc., leave to enter, and some of us
rambled all over the Convent. I never saw more poverty, misery, and
dirt, except indeed some of the cells which were tolerably neat. Most
of the Nuns were in the Choro at prayers, and not a little astonished
at seeing a large party of men appear at the door from the inside.
There were some pretty girls enough, but they were so long at
Prayers, that we could not stop to speak with them, and had the full
and free range of their abode. This visit of the great people will
furnish conversation, I dare say, for years!
The price of Indian Corn at Montemor Velho, which regulates for
Coimbra and all that neighbourhood, was last week at 11
Testoons[22] the Alqueire. It had been at 12 T. the fortnight before.
Believe me ever, my dear Father, Your most sincerely affectionate
son,
Wm. Warre.
[22] Testoon = about 5d. Alqueire = about 3 Imp. gallons.
To His Brother
Hd. Qrs., P.A. Francoso, Nr. Pinhel, June 27, 1810.
My Dear Tom,
We removed our Hd. Qrs. here two days ago and the English Hd.
Qrs. to Almeida, on account of the very interesting situation of
Ciudad Rodrigo, and to be within reach of immediate information
respecting any movements of the French Army, which becomes
every day more interesting. Their heavy Artillery being arrived, they
on the evening of the 24th commenced a brisk fire on the place,
which was returned with great vivacity by the besieged, and
continued until 10 o’clock on the 25th in the morning, when a most
tremendous explosion took place in the French lines from their
Powder Magazine blowing up, (N.B. has since been ascertained to
have been in the town), and immediately after two lesser explosions
(which were in the French lines). The quantity of Powder must have
been very great, as it was seen at this place by several of our
officers, nearly 40 miles off, and at Almeida, half-way between this
and the Ciudad Rodrigo, the shock was very strongly felt, and
Governor Cox writes that it shook the whole place. Certain it is that
the French batteries ceased firing and the Spaniards continued for
two hours after.
If their loss is what we suppose from these circumstances, it will
be a most serious loss to them, as I know not how soon they can
replace it in Spain, and will probably delay their attack upon us for 6
weeks or 2 months, a great point gained for us, whose object is by
gaining time to complete the discipline of our Army, etc., and who are
getting very healthy. These, however, are the effects we wish for,
and, like other people, we are very apt to fancy the probability of
what we wish for, though at the same time you must not imagine that
we are the least afraid of them even now. We know that their army is
very sickly. They average deaths 46 to 50 a day, are in want of
everything, and their intercepted letters show that they are very
much disgusted. The Spaniards carry on a desultory and most
destructive warfare. They scarcely dare move out of their Quarters
without risking to be assassinated, and their losses in this way and
by desertion are very great in every part of Spain.
They drive in our Picquets now and then. They have a great
superiority of Cavalry, but nothing of any consequence has taken
place. But if the greatest part of their powder is not destroyed, we
may expect something every day. I cannot think they will let
Crawfurd with the advance Guard remain so near them. Their and
our vedettes are 400 to 500 paces from each other and we overlook
their camp, which is very extensive, I suspect more so than they
have any occasion for, considering the number of men they have.
They are quite up to all this sort of humbug. If our Portuguese do as
we expect, we are not uneasy as to the result, and if we lick them
what a glorious day for Old England! I like this place better than
Fornos, though we are not very well off either, and have a large
Brigade of Infantry with us in the town. I am very well, the only
annoyance is my face, which as well as my lips always peel and are
very sore. By the end of the campaign I daresay we may pass
ourselves off for Portuguese Indians, or any other tawny gentry you
please. Adieu, etc.
Francoso, July 9, 1810.

July 2.—Hardinge and myself left Francoso about 6 in the evening
to visit the advanced guard and outposts of the Army under Br. Genl.
Crawfurd stationed in front of Gallegos, in New Castile, with his Hd.
Qrs. at Almeida, about 4 miles in the rear. We arrived late in the
evening at Pinhel, where we remained the night. Next morning set
out after breakfasting with our friend Major Murphy of the 88th, (the
Bishop of Pinhel being absent from Pinhel,) having dined at
Francoso the day we left it for Almeida, the direct road to which we
missed, and proceeded by an almost impassable path down to the
Coa, which here on either side presents a most formidable position,
totally impracticable for cavalry and artillery except over the bridge
and high road leading to Almeida from Freixedas, Guarda, Pinhel,
etc. According to the reports of its whole course from its confluence
into the Douro to near Alfaiates, with the exception of two leagues
beyond Almeida towards its source, it presents, from the very great
steepness and rocky soil of its banks, a most formidable barrier to
any army attempting to advance towards Vizeu, Celorico, Guarda, or
Francozo, from the neighbourhood of Ciudad Rodrigo. It is, however,
liable to be turned by Sabugal, or Castello Branco, and opposed to a
superior army its great extent is a very serious inconvenience, as
any part of the line being forced must oblige the rest to retire.
While Almeida, which is about a mile and a half from the river on
the Spanish side, holds out, I consider any attack by that road as not
to be feared. Though the greatest part of the descent to the bridge is
out of sight of the town, the enemy’s movements would be very
much impeded in attempting to advance. Considering all
circumstances, the great superiority of the enemy and nature of a
great part of our troops, I have much doubt in my own mind of any
position being attempted to be defended on the Coa, as a general
one for the Army, but this a few days must show, and I am no way in
the secret.
We crossed the Coa at a very bad ford called Veia, about a mile
below the bridge, and arrived at Almeida, waited on Governor Cox;
and, after walking round the works (which from their nature I do not
at all envy him the defence of, considering the troops he has, mostly
Militia,) continued our march to Fort Conception to see our friend Lt.
Col. Sutton, who had been appointed Governor, when there was an
intention to defend it. But since the great superiority of the enemy
rendered it impossible to attempt to relieve the brave Spaniards in
Ciudad Rodrigo, it has been resolved to blow it up, and it has for that
purpose been mined all round. When the enemy seriously advance
this beautiful Fort will be entirely destroyed. It is a thousand pities. I
never saw a more complete or perfect fortification with every part
bomb-proof, even stabling for 200 horses. Its outworks are admirably
adapted to defend the approaches, which are all round a perfect
natural glacis to several hundred yards. Of the necessity of the
measure I am no judge, but fear it will much vex the Spaniards.
We arrived about 3 o’clock at Almeida, and dined with Genl.
Crawfurd, with whom after dinner we rode out to look at the French
posts beyond the little river Azara, over which there is a bridge of
stone leading to the village of Marialva, and about a mile beyond
Gallegos. Along this line were about 3 squadrons of the German 1st
Hussars doing the outpost duty, their reserves in Gallegos. I went
down to the bridge and endeavoured to persuade two French
Officers to come down and speak to me. They were, however, very
shy, and only came near enough for me to tell them that some
friends of theirs, who were taken prisoners near Chaves a year and
a half ago, were well. I observed they were constructing a wooden
bridge a short distance to the left of the former, and from the
exhausted appearance of the Forage on the other side, their having
removed the cars from blocking up the stone bridge, and certain
reports of deserters, it appeared very probable they would drive in
our posts next morning, the 4th July. They had there and near Carpio
about 5 or 6 Regts. of Cavalry and some Infantry, 4 to 5000 men I
should guess in all. Our Infantry, consisting of the 43rd, 52nd, Rifle
Corps, and two Portuguese Caçadores Battns., one very good and
the other very bad, were stationed in the woods in front of Alumeda,
about 3 or 4 miles in our rear.
At daybreak they crossed the little river Azara over their two
bridges, and drove in our Picquets. They had 12 squadrons and 2
Brigades of Infantry, but our three squadrons were supported by a
troop of Horse Artillery, which kept them in check and enabled our
little body to retreat in safety on the Infantry though close pressed
and skirmishing very sharply the whole way. It was the prettiest
thing, en fait de guerre, I ever saw. The retreat was very well
conducted. Their Artillery could not come up till near the end of the
affair, and ours killed a great many of their men and horses, while
our Cavalry were in comparative safety. Their numbers enabled
them constantly to turn our flanks, and the superiority of our horses
as often to get out of the scrape.
A party of the German Hussars under Capt. Kranckenberg
behaved particularly well, charging at the passage of a small bridge
a very superior number of the enemy, though supported by four
Squadrons within pistol shot on the other side. It was very well done.
Two French Officers were severely wounded and some men, and
one prisoner was taken, though, poor devil, he was covered with
wounds, 6 in the head, and his arm nearly cut off, also run through
the body, and wonderful to say, he is expected to recover. The
French seemed much irritated at this check, and kept up a very brisk
fire up the road we retreated by, within about 50 yards from us. Nor
were they sparing in abuse, and confident of still cutting us off, when
we arrived at our Infantry which checked them, and a Squadron of
their 3rd Hussars coming unexpectedly on the 3rd P. Caçadores (an
excellent Corps commanded by Lt.-Col. Elder) received a very warm
salutation which dispersed them. The Battalion behaved very
steadily and well, and give us hopes of the Portuguese troops, on
whose conduct the issue of this Campaign must in a great measure
depend.
The Division commenced its retreat towards Fort Conception
covered by the Cavalry, whom I here quitted, having offered myself
to act as aide-de-camp to Genl. Crawfurd. The Infantry returned in
very good order through Alumeda towards Fort Conception, and
General Carrera with his Spaniards, who were in our rear, by the
fords of Algardon to a very strong position covering the roads that
way. These Spaniards are remarkably fine men, about 3000 well
clothed, though not uniformly, and armed. I did not, however, think
much of their discipline or regularity. Hardinge placed them, and
seemed to be much pleased with General Carrera’s appearance and
manner.
The French gave up the pursuit about half a league from Fort
Conception, and retired again to Gallegos, on this side of which
place they established their vedettes, having attained, what I
suppose was their intention, a new ground to forage on, and having
reconnoitred our force, to ascertain whether or not Lord Wellington
had come up with the army. Our loss was about 4 or 5 men wounded
and as many horses. That of the French, so far as we could see, and
have since heard from deserters, several Officers and about 30 or 40
men killed and wounded. After halting about two hours near the Fort,
our advanced guard took up a position at Val de la Mula, on the
Portuguese frontier, with the Cavalry about a league in front, leaving
a space of about a league between their vedettes and ours. And this
ended this little affair which Hardinge and myself had so much
wished to see, and which was certainly very instructive. Au reste a
great deal of firing to very little purpose. A strong proof of how
ineffectual the skirmishing of Cavalry is, except to cover the retreat
of larger bodies, and prevent the columns being fired into. Our
people and theirs were constantly within 30 yards of one another
firing with no effect, though neither party had any idea of fear. When
it can possibly be avoided the less powder wasted this way the
better. The best arm for Cavalry is the sword or sabre, a well broken
horse and firm presence of mind, reserving the pistol or carbine
merely for the purpose of vedettes, or covering some movement.
At Val de la Mula Col. Pakenham asked us to breakfast and
afterwards to dinner, and during the whole of our stay we are much
indebted to his civility, as also to Capt. Rowan and Wm. Campbell,
brother to Augustus, who prevented our ever wanting a meal or
forage for our horses during our stay. General Crawfurd was also
very civil to us. While retreating he sent me with some letters to
Governor Cox at Almeida, whom, however, I was fortunate enough
to meet at Val de la Mula, which saved me a very tiresome ride, and
enabled me to return immediately, but everything was over, and I
was so tired that I was very glad to lay down in the guard-room of the
Fort, which was evacuated, to take a nap, which was not of long
duration, as I had taken possession of the mattress of a Spanish
shepherdess of no very gentle nature, who was so clamorous and
violent in claiming her property, that I was forced to yield it up for fear
I might not escape so well from her gentle paws, as I had from the
French. Besides, poor things, I could not but pity them. It was most
distressing to see them abandoning their habitations, and flying
away from the miscreants, loaded with what little property they could
carry away, crying and lamenting, followed by their helpless children,
while the men drove away their cattle, and all uncertain where they
might find a place of safety. In Portugal the natural animosity which
exists so violently on the frontiers, and which even the similarity of
their misfortunes and distress cannot do away, they had but a dismal
prospect of meeting with a friendly reception. I pitied them from my
heart, to relieve was not in my power. How little does the
independent happy English Peasant know how to value the peace
and security in which he lives! And how would those miscreants who
preach discontent and faction through the country, giving them ideas
of wants and liberties which are incompatible with society and
government, how would they blush if they were to witness the
sufferings and oppression which these poor people undergo! They
would see that in England alone the peasantry are now happy and
free, and would see their own infamy in sowing the seeds of discord
and civil dissension among that happy people, when every mind
should be united and heart joined to resist the oppressor of mankind!
If reform is necessary let us wait for moments of peace with foreign
enemies, when we do not risk, by dividing amongst ourselves, the
entire ruin of the most perfect fabric of government that ever existed,
even with all its faults, and give every advantage to our enemies by
exposing as some of our Senators do, by way of opposition to
Ministers, or to get themselves in, our forces, intentions, weakness,
faults, etc., etc., in fact, for the sake of a popular speech in the
House, tell the enemy everything they ought most to conceal, even
the stations and exact numbers of the troops, of ourselves, or of our
allies. This conduct leads us half way to our ruin, and we shall repent
it when it is too late.
On the 5th, early in the morning, Hardinge and myself rode out
beyond Alumeda, towards Gallegos, till near the enemies posts, to
see what damage we had done them the day before and what they
were about. We found in the road two of their dead and some
horses, evidently from the effects of our Artillery, as they were much
mangled, and we also saw some more to the right and left of the
road at a distance. A very large flight of vultures of very large size
were flying about them, and on the ground, which added much to the
disgust of the scene, and after ascertaining the positions of their
vedettes, we hastened to return. Being but indifferently mounted,
and at a great distance from our outposts, we were very much afraid
of being cut off by some of their patrols, and, returning through
Alumeda, I was just observing to Hardinge that we should look very
foolish if we were to be taken, when I turned my head and saw a
French Hussar close to us. Hardinge had not even his sabre, having
broken it the day before, and I saw nothing was to be done but to
charge him, for which purpose I drew my pistol and galloped at him,
when he surrendered, a no very glorious prize, as his horse was so
tired that he could not move out of a very slow pace, and it was with
difficulty and anxiety we got him into one of our picquets. He was a
French lad, and told me he had deserted that morning, owing to the
ill-treatment of his chief, and the want of everything they experienced
in their Camp, and said he intended to go to England and work at his
trade, a cabinet maker, as he had a cousin there, whom he intended
to enquire for at the Commune (police office), though he had not
heard of him for 4 years. I have great doubts of his being a deserter
at all, and rather think he was as much surprised to see us, as we
were to see him. He is quite a Frenchman, and contradicted himself
twenty times!
We arrived at our quarters at 8 o’clock, and breakfasted with Col.
Pakenham. After which we set out, 5 in number, well armed and
mounted, to reconnoitre the enemy on our left, and proceeded
without meeting any as far as Villa de Porco and Barcilha, from the
heights above which we distinctly saw with our glasses Ciudad
Rodrigo, which was keeping up a very heavy fire, and defending
itself as if it were manned by heroes. Let them now surrender when
they may. They have done their duty, and it is heartbreaking to think
we can in no way assist them.
At Barcilha our party divided. Hardinge, Col. Pakenham, and Capt.
Cotton went by the right, and Capt. Shaw, A.D.C. to Genl. Crawfurd,
and myself agreed to go and visit Villar de Ciervo, and all that line,
and ascertain whether the French had occupied all those places, or
Villar de la Egoa, where there are some excellent fords over the
Agueda, and which, being in rear considerably of our left on the 4th,
gave Genl. Crawfurd no small anxiety. We met nothing, and returned
about 4 to dinner, having suffered only from the extreme heat, which
fagged me a good deal, being rather bilious, and prevented my
accompanying them in the evening, instead of which I paid a visit to
my friends in the 52nd, whom I was very glad to see looking as well
as ever I saw them at Shorncliff, though perhaps with less pipeclay.
Next day was spent nearly in the same way. In the morning we
rode out reconnoitring to Alumeda, dined afterwards with General
Crawfurd, and set off on our return to Pinhel, 4 leagues, where we
arrived late at night and slept, and next day came home, after a most
delightful trip, and having just seen what we wished and expected.
The retreat of the advanced guard had for some days appeared
inevitable, and it was to see how it would be conducted that we went
over.
The desertion continues from the French in great numbers, 8 to 12
of a day while we remained with the advance guard, and they all
agree in stating that their Army is badly off for provisions, and the
foreigners much disgusted, and would desert in greater numbers but
for the vigilant means that are taken to prevent. Junot and Ney with
their Corps are before C. Rodrigo, and I believe also Masséna, as
are also the traitors Alorna, Pampeluna, Sancos Mezeude, against
whom no measures are taken by this Government, and we know
they are supplied with money, etc., from their estates in this country,
which are not sequestered or disturbed. So much for weakness and
infatuation! The count Doidga(?) has been declared infamous and
his offspring for three generations, and his property sequestered. He
is a poor wretch and can do no harm, though not less a traitor, while
these scoundrels, with arms in their hands, known traitors before the
Prince embarked, and treated by him with great lenity, are suffered to
attack their native country with impunity. It is most disgusting.
I do not think the French will attempt anything till C. Rodrigo falls,
which, notwithstanding their heroic conduct, cannot be long delayed.
It will enable the French to establish their magazines and hospital.
What the plans for the Campaign are I know not. Everything
promises a very warm one, and I confess I look with some anxiety to
the conduct of the Portuguese troops, on whom much, nay
everything, must depend. They promise well, it is true, in every
respect, but still they are very young troops and never tried. The
force against us is very superior. But on the other hand the greater
must be the difficulty of supplying them and means of transport. We
retire on our supplies while they advance from them. And everybody
has great confidence both in Lord Wellington and Marshal Beresford,
and if the native troops fight like men, I have not a doubt we shall
succeed, though the loss must be inevitably great on both sides.
My own idea of their attack is that they will keep their principal
Corps in our front, leave Regnier with his Corps, and keep Hill in
check in the Alemtejo, while with a strong column they endeavour to
force the passes near Castello Branco, or by Sabugal, endeavouring
to unite near Thomar. By this means if Hill retires and crosses the
Tagus, either at Villa Velha or Abrantes, the Alemtejo is left open,
and we cannot but feel some anxiety for the Capital, or rather for the
opposite side of the river, which would occasion great confusion. Hill
must then defend the passage of the Tagus, which abounds in fords
as low as Salvaterra, and also endeavour to check the enemy’s
advance by the passes of Salhadas, etc., from Castello Branco or
Abrantes, and if either of these movements of the enemy succeed, I
should imagine the whole Army must fall back from the Upper Beira
upon our works round Lisbon, that is Torres Vedras, Bucellas, etc.,
etc., for fear of its communications with Lisbon and our stores. Or if
they do not attempt Alemtejo, I think they will attempt advancing in
three columns by Castello Branco from Coria and Placencia, and
from Guinaldo, etc., by Sabugal, and in our front by Celorico or
Guarda, endeavouring to unite beyond the Sierra de Estrella. In this
case we shall come into play immediately. Almeida, I think, they will
merely mask by a strong Corps, and leave in their rear. If they
succeed, the place must fall of course. If not, there is not force
enough in it to annoy them. These are my own private opinions, and,
from the very little means I have of information, must be considered
as mere speculations, and as such, if erroneous, I may be excused,
as I really know not how far they may agree with any others.
Hd. Qrs., Francoso, July 10, 1810.
My Dear Father,
I received your letters of 13th, 15th June, on the 1st of this month,
and my having been absent at the outposts alone prevented me
writing by last packet to thank you for the very interesting information
you give me about Ferguson in particular, and the other occurrences
of the day, as also for the affectionate friendship and solicitude on
my account, which would be a sufficient reward in themselves for
anything I can ever do.
I send you, annexed, a sort of journal of my proceedings during
my little excursion to the outposts, which was very interesting. It was
written in considerable hurry and just as the things occurred to me.
The opinions also merely speculative, as I have but little means of
positive information. I should therefore wish you to consider it as
merely for your amusement and confidential, and for those few who
can feel any interest in such trifles because they concern me.
Our situation becomes every day more interesting. The heroic
defence of Ciudad Rodrigo has delayed the operations against this
country, but I consider that it is impossible the place can hold out
much longer.
What the issue of this contest may be, it is very difficult to guess.
The enemy have certainly from 70 to 80,000 men, and we as
certainly Troops of the Line not so many, though we have other
advantages which they cannot have, particularly the people and the
country in our favor. Lord Wellington and the Marshal appear very
confident and in high spirits, and so does the whole army, who are in
excellent order. Our Chiefs know best the real situation in which they
stand, and the confidence every one feels in them will make the
Army do wonders. Much must depend upon the Portuguese troops.
At all events I think prudence would dictate the removal of all
property from this country, and leaving as little to chance of war in
point of business as possible, and although I by no means wish to
croak, when I consider the great superiority of the enemy in
numbers, and the nature of our Troops, with many other
circumstances, I confess I do not feel quite so confident of our
ultimate success. But I shall not form any decided opinion till I see
our people tried.
Pray thank my dear mother for her kind letter of the 30th May from
Hendon, and Tom for his of the 19th June, and for Greenwood and
Cox’s abstract of my account. I am a good deal surprised they have
not received my claim for losses. By the account I see they have
received no part of them and suspect they do not much exert
themselves, as I know other Officers have received theirs. By Tom’s
letter I observe a warrant has been issued for £36, 15s., I suppose
for my horse shot at Vimiero.
I hope you have had a pleasant trip to Woburn and Holkham. I am
always happy when I hear of your amusing yourself in a way I know
to be so much to your satisfaction.
I have got at Lisbon two Merino Rams and 3 Ewes. They tell me
they are very fine, and my difficulty now is how to send them to you. I
write by to-day’s post to Messrs Bulkeley to beg them to take charge
of them for you, and send them by the first ship to London, and shall
inform you of their answer. If you had no place to keep them
yourself, and nobody else you wish to give them to, pray present
them to my uncle Greg with my kind love. I am, however, a good
deal bothered about getting them home, being myself at such a
distance from Lisbon.
Adieu; pray give my kindest love to my dearest mother, and
believe me ever your most truely Affectionate and Dutiful Son,
Wm. Warre.
I will tell Ld. W. about the pipe of wine when I see him, and am
much obliged by your attention about it.
July 11th.—A very heavy firing and cannonade was heard
yesterday morning at Ciudad Rodrigo, which is a proof that the place
still holds out. Poor fellows, I fear they will pay dear for their heroic
gallantry, since we cannot assist them.
I have been able to hear nothing further about the free importation
of rice and grain, and I fear it will not be allowed from the delay.
Hd. Qrs., Francoso, July 25, 1810.
My Dear Father,
I have but just time to write you a few lines that neither you nor my
mother may be anxious about me, when you hear of the unfortunate
affair of our Advanced Guard yesterday, at which, however, I was not
even present. The French attacked Br. Genl. Crawfurd’s Division,
consisting of 43, 52, 95, and 1st and 3rd Portuguese Caçadores,
about 3000 men, and some squadrons of Cavalry, with 23 squadrons
and about 10 to 12,000 Infantry. I fear there was some delay in
retiring across the Coa, and, being very close prest in their retreat,
our brave fellows suffered very considerable loss, about 300 killed
and wounded and 30 Officers. The 43rd I hear have suffered most,
and have 14 Officers killed and wounded, as also the 95th, of whose
loss I am ignorant, except of the death of poor Capt. Creagh. Col.
Nutt of 43rd is killed and Capt. Hull wounded. They had arrived from
England the evening before. The 52nd also lost some men and
Officers, but I have not been able to hear any names, except that of
Lt.-Col. Barclay being slightly wounded in the head. The 3rd
Caçadores under Col. Elder behaved very well, and suffered some
loss.
I am sorry I cannot add as much for the 1st, who did not behave
so, and ran off at the very beginning, though their Col. d’Arilez, a
very fine young man, behaved very well, as also some of the
Officers. So much for want of discipline and confidence. I had before
expressed my fears about them. I am just about setting off to enquire
into the business, and I hope a most severe example may be made
to prevent the recurrence of such a horrid disgraceful business. If
they will not fight from feelings of patriotism or honour, they must be
made to do so from fear of a more infamous death, and a more
certain one, if they deserve it. It is a measure of peremptory
necessity; though I have much pleasure in being able to add that in
an attack which Regnier made on Salvaterra away to our right, the
1st Portuguese Cavalry commanded by Col. Pays of Mangoalde
behaved most nobly, charged three times, and as often repulsed the
enemy, and at last completely drove them back, and I believe the
French had the superiority in numbers. Our advance guard having
effected its retreat at all before so very great a superiority is most
fortunate, that is across the Coa, whose banks are tremendously
steep, and the road narrow. The French three times attempted to
force the bridge after them but were repulsed, and lost a good many
men on it. The tremendously heavy rains and storm we have had
these last two days had fortunately spoiled the Fords of the River
entirely. Otherwise I much fear our little Corps would have been
entirely cut off and taken.
The English kept possession of the bank till early this morning,
when the whole line was abandoned and our advance established at
Carvalhos or Carvalhal. The French vedettes are on this side the
river, and Almeida is consequently in some degree invested. I scarce
believe they will besiege it, but rather content themselves with
blockading and starving it, which will not be easy, as they have 4
months’ provisions complete. Pray send Augustus Campbell word
that I hear both John and William are well, the former I am not sure
was engaged. Wm. was of course with Crawfurd. I fear you will be
scarce able to read this very hasty scrawl, but I have at this moment
so many things to do in order to get away before late in the evening
to reach Freixedas to-night, that they must serve as my excuse. You
shall hear from me every opportunity. Adieu. Pray give my kindest
love, etc. Yr. ever dutiful and affectionate Son,
Wm. Warre.
Lagiosa, August 8, 1810.

My Dearest Father,
Many many thanks for your very kind letter from Eastley End of the
16th July, and for the excellent account you give me of all my friends.
We continue here very quietly, and except the taking of a few
prisoners at the outposts in front, and the peasantry having risen and
killed a good many of the enemy, who straggle into the villages to
plunder or seek for food, nothing of any consequence has occurred
since my last.
The French appear to be preparing for the siege of Almeida, but
have not yet established any batteries. From the accounts of all
deserters and prisoners they are much distressed for provisions,
particularly bread, which as the Peasantry all fly from their ill-
treatment, they are forced to thrash out, carry to the mills, and grind
and bake themselves. In some places the Officers alone have bread,
in others they sometimes receive 3 lb. between 8 men. They are also
much in want of shoes. A very intelligent Italian sergeant, who was
brought in yesterday, assured me that their 66th Regt. lost on the
24th Ultmo., in the attack near Almeida, 500 killed and wounded, and
the other two Regiments also a very large proportion. They therefore
must have lost upwards of 1000 men in all, which is more than we
supposed. They continue to desert in great numbers whenever they
have the opportunity.
Our Portuguese troops are behaving very well. The 1st Regt. of
Dns. at Atalaya towards Castello Branco attacked 80 French who
were in the town, killed 25, and took 20 men and horses. Yesterday
evening an account arrived from Bragança that a squadron of the
12th Dns. had been attacked by a French squadron, which they
defeated, took 40 men and horses Prisoners, and killed all the rest,
except 2 Officers and a soldier who escaped. Many of these
Prisoners are badly wounded. The Portuguese squadron must have
behaved very well to have done the business so effectually, and
although these small affairs are of no great consequence (in
themselves), yet they give us very pleasant hopes of what the
Portuguese [troops] will do when more seriously engaged.
I have this instant been to see three French Cavalry, who deserted
yesterday evening. They say they did so because they are starved,
and that 25 of the 3rd Hussars and 8 more of their men had deserted
the day before. These men, who are native French, come over
mounted and completely armed. They say that nothing but
desperation could make the Infantry go leagues from the Army to get
food at the risk they run from the Peasantry, and that their Regt. of

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New Media and the Artaud Effect Jay

New Media and the Artaud Effect Jay Murphy

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the

The Zelensky Effect Olga Onuch

The Zelensky Effect Olga Onuch

The Riley Effect (Westvale University) Nicole Marie

The Psychology of Evolving Technology: How Social

Media Logic(s) Revisited: Modelling the Interplay

Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing: World,

“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

2 The Power of Capture 51

3 Beyond Hieroglyphics: I 87

4 Beyond Hieroglyphics: II119

5 Don’t Forget the Virtual151