New Media and the Artaud Effect Jay

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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

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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
 1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 5

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.
 1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 7

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.
 1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 9

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.
 1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 11

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
Kenner. The Pound Era. p. 289.
 1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 13

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.
 1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 15

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
Deleuze. Cinema 1. p. 24.
79
Deleuze. Cinema 2. p. 35.
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.
 1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 17

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
Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. p. 47.
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
Kenner. The Pound Era. p. 227.
92
Penelope Wilson. Hieroglyphs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 7.
 1 LIVING HIEROGLYPHS 19

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
Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. p. 59.
99
Paul Cornelius. Languages in 17th and Early Eighteenth Century Imaginary Voyages.
Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1965. p. 101.
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