Longer Views: Extended Essays Read online

  that father and mother

  invented

  in order to enjoy him to the utmost.

  Who is that, him?

  Strangled totem.

  like a member in a pocket

  that life frockets

  from so close,

  that the walled-in totem will finally

  burst the belly to be born . . .

  And from still another, “La Culture Indienne”:

  . . . Caffre of urine from the slope of a hard vagina,

  which resists when one takes it.

  Urinary camphor from the mound of a dead vagina,

  which slaps you when you stretch it. . .

  Which two, and which of the two?

  Who, both?

  in the time

  seventy times accursed

  when man

  crossing himself

  was born son

  of his sodomy

  on his own ass

  grown hard.

  Why two of them,

  and why born of TWO? . . .

  If the poems were opaque, the night’s performance must have been stunning—in both good and bad ways: Soon, Artaud dropped his prepared papers on the stage and began to extemporize on his treatment by psychiatrists at Rodez, where he had almost died of malnutrition, and on the terrors of the shock treatments he had endured there. By midnight, when he had gone on for more than two hours, finally not to conclude but rather to flee the stage in a state of emotional distress—it was finally over!—the audience was devastated. Here are two many-times-reprinted responses by men who attended that night’s “lecture.” The first is from the journalist Maurice Saillet on the first prepared hour of the performance:

  . . . 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 a danger zone, sucked up by that black sun, consumed by the “overall combustion” of a body that was itself a victim of the flames of the spirit.

  About the latter impromptu part of the night, we have a letter from André Gide, who felt that Artaud’s exit was among the most moving moments of his life:

  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.

  To get some insight into Artaud’s raillery against psychiatrists, note that, in the same month as his “lecture,” one day he left Ivry to see the van Gogh (1853-1890) exhibit at the Orangerie. Returning from the exhibit, Artaud visited his art dealer friend Pierre Loeb (who had arranged the benefit sale of paintings for Artaud’s welfare), excited and exalted by the paintings he’d just seen.

  “Why couldn’t you write a book on van Gogh?” Loeb suggested, against the rush of Artaud’s enthusiasm—at which point Artaud marched upstairs to the first floor of Loeb’s house, sat down, and began to write—rapidly, nervously—his impressions.

  Following up his eccentric friend’s interest in the exhibition, a few days later Loeb sent Artaud a letter and some newspaper clippings about the exhibit. One of the articles, written by a psychiatrist, referred to van Gogh as a “degenerate of the Magnon type.” Artaud was incensed. Over five or six more days, along with the written impressions of that first afternoon, he produced an impassioned panegyric (and one of his most influential essays), “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society” (1947).

  Loeb once wrote that the piece was written over two afternoons, the first of them spent at Loeb’s upstairs writing desk. But this is unlikely, given the essay’s length—thirty printed pages. The essay has six titled sections, which have the feel of at least six sittings about them—and possibly more. One is formed of a mosaic of paragraphs, carefully assembled from van Gogh’s letter to his beloved brother Theo. It is simply not the sort of thing one dashes off in an hour—even under the most manic expressive impulse. Also there is at least one reference in the text to “this month of February, 1947,” which would suggest work on the piece was going on at least two weeks beyond mid-January. Still, most likely, some of what Artaud said the night of the 13th, from the Vieux Columbier stage, about psychiatry, about himself, and/or about van Gogh, became the substance for what he wrote in his essay—if not vice versa.

  Artaud had written art reviews before and always had strong opinions. Delacroix, Giotto, Brueghel, Modigliani, Picasso, Klee—these were among his enthusiasms. On the other hand, for Artaud Matisse was only a “trickster” and Picabia merely “amusing.” But these opinions dated from before the last nine years’ internment at Rodez. Also Artaud himself was drawing and painting constantly these days.

  Artaud’s van Gogh essay is a perverse combination of madness and insight. Psychiatrists in general—and van Gogh’s psychiatrist in particular, Dr. Gachet—are the villains of the piece. Though the essay does not survey the paintings in any particular specificity, Wheatfield with Crows, the painting van Gogh worked on two days before his suicide, clearly fascinated Artaud. The introduction, however, begins as close to madness as any writer might want to stray:

  One can speak of the good mental health of van Gogh who, in his whole life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear,

  in a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp,

  just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother.

  And this is not an image, but a fact abundantly and daily repeated and cultivated throughout the world . . .

  Soon, however, after a foray against a psychiatrist, Dr. L., it moves on to lyrical insights into the paintings:

  Pure linear painting had been driving me mad for a long time when I encountered van Gogh, who painted neither line nor forms but things of inert nature as if in the throes of convulsions.

  And inert.

  . . . The latest van Gogh exhibit at the Orangerie does not have all the very great paintings of the unfortunate painter. But among those that are there, there are enough rotating processions studded with clumps of carmine plants, enough sunken roads with overhanging yews, enough violet suns whirling over haystacks of pure gold, enough Père Tranquille and enough self-portraits,

  to remind us what a sordid simplicity of objects, peoples, materials, elements,

  van Gogh drew on for these kinds of organ peals, these fireworks, these atmospheric epiphanies . . .

  The crows painted two days before his death did not, anymore than his other paintings, open the door for him to a certain posthumous glory, but they do open to painterly painting, or rather to unpainted nature, the secret door to a possible beyond, to a possible permanent reality, through the door opened by van Gogh to a possible and sinister beyond.

  It is not unusual to see a man, with the shot that killed him already in his belly, crowding black crows onto a canvas, and under them a kind of meadow—perhaps livid, at any rate empty—in which the wine color of the earth is juxtaposed wildly with the dirty yellow of the wheat.

  But no other painter besides van Gogh would have known how to find, as he did in order to paint his crows, that truffle black, that “rich banquet” black which is at the same time, as it were, excremental, of the wings of the crows surprised in the fading gleam of evening . . .

  For no one until then had turned the earth into that dirty linen twisted with wine and wet blood.

  The sky in the painting is very low, bruised,

  violet, like the lower edges of lightning.

  The strange shadowy fringe of the void rising after the flash.

  Van Gogh loosed his crows like the black microbes of his suicide’s spleen a few centimeters from the top as if from the bottom of the canvas,

  following the black slash of that line where the beating of their rich plumage add
s to the swirling of the terrestrial storm the heavy menace of a suffocation from above.

  And yet the whole painting is rich.

  Rich, sumptuous, and calm.

  Worthy accompaniment to the death of a man who during his life set so many drunken suns swirling above so many unruly haystacks and who, desperate, with a bullet in his belly, had no other choice but to flood a landscape with blood and wine, to drench the earth with a final emulsion, both dark and joyous, with a taste of bitter wine and spoiled vinegar. . . . I am returning [Artaud writes, in the midst of one of the essay’s three rather arbitrarily-arranged postscripts, eighteen pages later] to the painting of the crows.

  Who has already seen, as in this painting, the earth become equivalent to the sea?

  In the eighteen-page ellipsis, and again after it, the essay plunges into a jeremiad against psychiatry and society, studded with references to Artaud’s own stay at Rodez. When the essay ends, we are back in something akin to madness—if not within madness itself. On the closing page, Artaud reviles the bourgeois Parisian public who filed past van Gogh’s paintings at the Orangerie, oblivious to “the hate” with which, in the winter evenings of 1946, they or “their fathers and mothers” so “effectively strangled” the self-slaughtered artist.

  The essay ends:

  But did there not fall, on one of the evenings I speak of, at the Boulevard de la Madeleine, at the corner of the rue des Mathurins, an enormous white rock that might have come from a recent eruption of the volcano Popocatépetl?

  And it is over.

  But I suspect the only responsible answer we can give to Artaud’s terminal rhetorical question is: Probably not.

  Still, when part of the van Gogh essay was translated and appeared in Horizon magazine in 1948, the young R. D. Laing read it while still a student. He claims that its discussion of psychiatry (which I have not quoted) was a decisive influence in his later thinking about the relationship between psychiatrists and the mad.

  During his last year, Artaud was in great demand.

  But there is a certain machinery of defeat built into the celebrity of the deranged—who are often wanted for the show they put on, more than for the substance of their work.

  On February 1, 1948, Artaud’s last piece, a radio play for four voices, xylophone, gongs, other percussion instruments, and sound effects, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu), commissioned from Artaud for the series Les Voix des poètes, was finally banned by station manager Wladimir Porché, only a day before its announced public broadcast time of February 2 over Radiodiffusion Française. The recording had been made in November, between the 22nd and the 29th. The “play” contained some older poems by Artaud, as well as a majority of new sections, written for the occasion and dictated to Paule Thévenin, a young actress who was at once Artaud’s private acting student, his secretary, the wife of his medical doctor, and—after his death—the editor of his complete works.

  Artaud had heard (or thought he had heard; or made it up on his own as an extended metaphor) that, in order to be admitted to public schools in the United States, American schoolboys were forced to give sperm samples that were later stored for artificial insemination in order to swell the ranks of the U.S. military. Artaud’s play begins (and ends) with an outraged protest against this practice in particular and America in general. In between, it once more praises the Tarahumara Indians, excoriates the Mass, reviles sex in general, presents a hymn to shit, declares Artaud’s sanity, and tells us that we must learn to “eat rat daintily.”

  In January, Artaud had gone to the radio studio, where he’d listened once more to the whole piece with the cast and technicians. He had made a few cuts and even re-recorded a section, to ready it for the February 2 broadcast. Porché’s decision to withdraw the piece had been reached a few days before, but it was only communicated to the sickly Artaud on the first.

  Throughout February, letters were written back and forth over the banning. There was a minor Parisian press war. In his outraged letter of February 4th to Porché, Artaud claimed that, after reviewing the tape himself back in January along with the rest of the show’s technicians (Artaud’s letter during his last two years were frequently broken up like poems), he had conscientiously let nothing “pass / that might infringe on / taste, / morals, / good manners, / honorable intentions, / or furthermore that might / exude / boredom, / familiarity, / routine, / I wanted a fresh work, one that would make contact with certain organic points of life, / a work / in which one feels one’s whole nervous system / illuminated as if by a miner’s cap-lamp / with vibrations / consonances / which invite / man / TO EMERGE / WITH / his body / to follow in the sky this new, unusual, and radiant Epiphany. . . .”

  Fernand Pouey (who had commissioned the piece) scheduled a private studio broadcast, for the evening of February 5. The audience of fifty invited to the studio that night were to act as a jury and decide whether the piece merited rescheduling. Their names read like a Who’s Who of the arts in ’40s Paris: Raymond Queneau, Louis Jouvet, Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Georges Braque, Jean-Louis Barrault . . . That night the voices of the actors, whom, three months before, Artaud had rehearsed for over two weeks in almost daily trips from Ivry into Paris—Maria Casarés, who had played Death in Cocteau’s film Orphé; Roger Blin, who a double handful of years before had played one of the two mute assassins in The Cenci (Blin had also been The Cenci’s production assistant; besides writing the play, Artaud had in 1935 starred in and directed it as well), and whose productions of Genet a handful of years hence would galvanize the French theater; Paule Thévenin; and Artaud himself—went through the howls, screams, roarings, and sobs which Artaud had interlarded throughout this agonized work. Needless to say, the audience unanimously supported the broadcast. But even the most auspicious fifty supporters, when a work has been promised to a public of thousands, must still have been distressing for the writer—who was now dying from advanced rectal cancer.

  In a letter to Pouey, written from Ivry two days after the private performance, Artaud declared: “. . . I do not understand how an incompetent, scarcely out of university, like Wladimir Porché, can take it upon himself to cancel the broadcast of a document that was ANNOUNCED several weeks ago / and consequently / listened to / by dozens of technicians who judged its value / and DECIDED / that it should be broadcast. . . .” There are other letters to the press. In response to some serious comment on the piece, in still another letter to Pouey and to the technical director René Guignard, in expectation of an eventual airing, on February 17 Artaud asked for a few more cuts in the tape from the introductory section: “I think that what certain people like Georges Braque found so overwhelming and exciting about the Radio Broadcast To Have Done with the Judgment of God are the parts where sound effects and xylophonics accompany the poems read by Roger Blin and Paule Thévenin. We must not spoil the effect of the xylophonics by the logical, dialectical, and argumentative quality of the opening section . . . / I beg you to make these cuts, / I beg you / both of you / to MAKE SURE that these cuts are carefully made. / There must be nothing left in this Radio Broadcast that might disappoint, / tire, / or bore / an enthusiastic audience which was struck by the freshness of the sound effects and xylophonics / which even Balinese, Chinese, Japanese, and Singhalese theater do not have. . . .”

  Despite the jury of literary luminaries, however, station manager Porché remained adamant.

  The play would not go out on the public airwaves.

  Fernand Pouey resigned.

  And in his last letter, to Thévenin on February 24th from his room at Ivry, a day after they had gone to dinner together at a Paris restaurant, Artaud wrote: “Paule, I am very sad and desperate, / my body hurts all over, / but above all I have the impression that people were disappointed in my radio broadcast. / Wherever the machine is / there is always the abyss and the void, / there is a technical intervention that distorts and annihilates what one has done. / The criticisms of M. and A. A. are un
just but they must have been based on some weakness in the transitions, / this is why I am through with Radio, / and from now on will devote myself / exclusively / to the theater / as I conceive it, / a theater of blood, / a theater which each performance will have done / something / bodily / to the one who performs as well as to the one who comes to see others perform, / but actually / the actors are not performing, / they are doing. / The theater is in reality the genesis of creation. / This will happen. / I had a vision this afternoon—I saw those who are going to follow me and who are still not completely embodied because pigs like those at the restaurant last night eat too much. There are some who eat too much and others like me who can no longer eat without spitting. / Yours, Antonin Artaud.” The cancer that agonized Artaud had reached the point where his doctor simply allowed him as much chloral as he wanted. Over the nine days after that last letter (1948 was a leap year) Artaud drew or chopped at his block or dosed himself into unconsciousness—and died.

  In the Ivry-sur-Seine pavilion, his friends kept vigil by the body for three days—primarily to shoo off the rats that plagued the building but also to turn away the priests they feared Artaud’s family might send against the wishes of the militantly atheist blasphemer.

  There is only one little point I would ask you to hold tightly to as we move on in this discussion. Those flawed “transitions” Artaud castigates himself for in this pathetic, terminal epistle are finally part of an entire pre-Artaudian critical system—a system that, clearly, Artaud himself was enmeshed in until he could criticize no longer, a system whose historical constitution (not as a series of rhetorical borrowings, which are all too easily traceable to Aristotle’s Poetics, but rather as an entire nineteenth-century discursive practice) is the real topic of our essay here. A flawed “transition” is the failing traditionally invoked when that romantic ideal, “unity of impression,” was assumed not to have been achieved: i.e., if all transitions between all the parts of an aesthetic work are perfect, then the whole must appear unified, Q.E.D. The presuppositions supporting such a critical system, however, are myriad. They include the unproblematic transparency between life and language, presentation and representation, intention and effect, and our ability to locate and respond to the “parts” themselves, as well as a psychological autonomy and a psychological malleability to the subject represented that flies in the face of practically any materialist critique, from the most vulgar to the most sophisticated. But more of that later.