On Artaud - Roger Shattuck in NYRB in 1976:
‘You are in Paris, a city still gray from occupation and unsure of peace. The tiny theater overflows with people, all looking important or intense. Someone behind you is identifying them: André Gide in a wool cap, Albert Camus, André Breton recently returned from New York, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan, and a crowd of prominent actors and directors. They have all come to hear a one-man lecture-performance by Artaud.
Artaud comes on stage alone. Dressed like a clochard, he looks emaciated and a little startled. When he starts reading from the pile of papers, his voice sounds emasculated, yet undeniably powerful. There is some heckling, then a tight silence. Artaud declaims, whispers, roars, and comes to an awkward pause. He seems to have lost his place or his nerve, shuffles his papers, takes his head in his hands as if he were giving up. Yet he starts again. Now he is not reading but haranguing the audience. “Saliva.” “Syphilis.” “Piss.” “Electroshock.” He stops to catch his breath, then reads again.’
(…)
‘In his collection of essays and manifestoes, The Theater and Its Double (1938; English translation, 1958). Artaud proclaimed that the theater, mobilized into total spectacle by the director’s commanding imagination and subservient to no literary text, should become as powerful an agent of cultural and emotional change as a plague, or cruelty, or hunger. During the Fifties and Sixties, these (far from new) ideas traveled fast. They played a key role in the articulation of the anti-aesthetic mode ultimately named the “happening.” For it was John Cage’s reading of Artaud (in French, suggested to him by Pierre Boulez before the translation appeared) that provided the impetus for the original multi-media show at Black Mountain College in 1952. Cage persuaded Charles Olson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham to participate in that remarkable performance.’
(…)
‘Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and particularly Derrida have accorded Artaud a significant place in their works of cultural psychoanalysis. They have good grounds. For the primary meaning of Artaud’s work reaches beyond theater fashions and literary theory to pose tense questions about the relation of civilized living to madness and acting.’
(…)
‘In 1937, unable to break his long-standing drug habit and behaving in a highly unstable manner, Artaud left for Ireland. He claimed he was returning St. Patrick’s cane, an object he carried around with him in the streets and cafés of Paris. A few months later he came back to France—in a straitjacket. The first five years of his confinement were spent in the most degrading and debilitating of mental hospitals. Then his mother and some friends intervened during the war to have him transferred to a private institution in Rodez in south-central France. Dr. Ferdière, a widely cultured and sympathetic young psychiatrist, gave Artaud electroshock treatments, allowed him considerable freedom, and encouraged him to write and paint again. As Artaud gradually improved, his Paris friends clamored for his release and finally obtained it. He survived nearly two years of postwar Paris.’
(…)
‘Despite his metaphysical refusal to acknowledge natural birth as his origin, he remained attached to and attentive to his mother. Elegant patronesses supported his theatrical projects. Established publishers accepted and even sought out his most idiosyncratic works. Through an uncle, he had a special entry into theater and film circles in Paris. Friends raised money to send him to Mexico, and the Mexican government itself sponsored his trip to the Tarahumara region. The years of confinement from 1937 to 1943 must have been frightful. Then he was transferred to Rodez by special dispensation and finally freed. Artaud’s myth of himself, mediated through van Gogh, as “driven to suicide by society” will not pass muster. He was a favorite son from the start.’
(…)
‘There is no evident reason not to believe him when he says that he risks losing his mind the way the rest of us might get a headache or a chill. Twenty years later he was still writing elaborately staged letters, this time from the mental hospital in Rodez, proclaiming not his sickness but his higher sanity.’
(…)
‘There is no evident reason not to believe him when he says that he risks losing his mind the way the rest of us might get a headache or a chill. Twenty years later he was still writing elaborately staged letters, this time from the mental hospital in Rodez, proclaiming not his sickness but his higher sanity.’
(…)
‘Artaud turned to the theater not as vocation but as potential salvation. He seems to have known early and clearly that he would need some form of therapy all his life. The psychiatrist who came closest to curing him, Dr. Ferdière, admits readily enough that electroshock may have been a questionable treatment, and that what really brought Artaud back across the line to precarious stability was “art therapy.” Any form of writing and painting seemed to help him in Rodez. In the Twenties Artaud had chosen an art form even better suited to his needs. Listen to the psychologist J.L. Moreno defining the advantages of psychodrama as therapy for a patient. “On the stage he may find his equilibrium again, due to its methodology of freedom…. The stage is an extension of life beyond the reality test of life itself. Reality and fantasy are not in conflict.” Philip Rieff identifies the two most important institutions for “the triumph of the therapeutic” as the theater and the hospital. Artaud served most of his life in one place or the other. However I would not say that Artaud represents anything like a successful case of “therapeutic man.” He did what he could.’
(…)
‘Artaud’s short pilgrimage in 1936 to the Tarahumara region in Mexico and his participation in the peyote rite represent his furthest foray toward a steady state of exhilaration. He began writing on the spot about those divinely possessed Indians, their magic mountain full of signs, and their cruel gestural ritual. Ten years later, after Ireland and the mental asylums, he was still writing accounts of “the three happiest days of my existence.” He had found his living theater.
Boredom disappeared, I ceased looking for a reason to live, and I no longer had to carry my body. I grasped that I was inventing my life, that this was my function and my raison d’être, and that I got bored when I had no more imagination and peyote was giving it to me.’
(…)
‘Sustained exaltation, the permanent high, is not humanly possible; to seek it is to aspire to the divine. We exist in fluctuations of mind and body, and Artaud’s written texts and his whole approach to the theater as liquidation, as orgy, declares his intolerance of being simply a man. The rest is perfectly logical and consistent. In our society, wary of shamans unless they are successful gurus, we classify “divine frenzy” with insanity. Therefore, Artaud’s confinement in mental institutions confirmed his ambitions at the same time as it removed him from society.’
(…)
‘We now face several complications. Having rejected the literary text as the basis of theatrical performance, Artaud went on to try out the possibilities of magical, non-linguistic, incantatory sounds in poetry. I think we can keep track of his movements only if we have in mind some rough definition of the nature of verbal expression. Let me reduce the jungle of theory to two basic approaches.
The first says expression kills. Genuine feelings and thoughts lie below the level of verbal discourse. When brought to the surface by the gross processes of language, they shrivel and die. Expression betrays the integrity of thought in its natural habitat. “Language,” writes Nietzsche, “remains incapable of objectifying the great human myths.”
The second approach says expression creates. Until we try to express them, we hardly know what feelings and thoughts we have. Words are not frozen scraps of experience but still malleable tokens for it. A writer both uses words to guide his thought and reshapes words as his thought outstrips their ordinary meanings. “I noted down the inexpressible,” brags Rimbaud, half ironic, half incredulous.’
(…)
‘To read his French critics, particularly Derrida, you would take Artaud for a basically anal writer, hoarding all thought formations. In reality, he had a serious case of logorrhea. At no time did Artaud approach the problem of language and expression with the uncluttered insight of Emily Dickinson.
A word is dead
When it is said Some say;
I say it just
Begins to live That day.’
(…)
‘Sade, Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, and Artaud were all certified by the culture as criminal or pathological, yet their lives and their work have not been cast out of the Republic of Letters. Quite the contrary, we carefully preserve their biographical and literary remains in the usually unstated belief that their strain may yield a valuable innoculation against dangerous ideas, including some of their own. This homeopathic faith justifying liberalism of mind and opposing Plato’s banishment of poets probably represents the most exciting risk Western culture has taken.’
(…)
‘How much commentary is needed? Artaud was prepared to renounce the social transactions of language, to renounce reason itself. He did not fear violence, bombs if necessary, against poets who did not submit to their true mission. All this in the name of “myth,” “being,” “collectivity.” Let us be very careful about this extreme case. When he was protesting the Surrealists’ blind march toward communism in 1927, Artaud could take a very different stand. “But what does all the Revolution in the world mean to me if I know I remain eternally afflicted and miserable in the midst of my own charnel house.” But over the long haul and in his most crucial texts, Artaud is prepared to surrender individual consciousness and even individual life to a higher collectivity. Some might call it a prophetic mind. I call it a totalitarian mind—or at least one deeply pulled in that direction.’
(…)
‘Having “taught” his works to college classes, I believe firmly (just short of fanatically) that we must ascertain the ingredients of the books we read, be they allopathic or homeopathic, evangelical or indigestible. Artaud contains a significant quantity of nostalgia for violence along with a tendency to capitulate to undefined collective forces that speak in an unknown tongue. Very strong medicine.’
Read the article here.
Higher sanity, what else can we aim for?
In the desert of Arizona somewhere in 2018 I tried peyote, it didn’t do much, perhaps I should have tried harder, but the desert in the night, where a group of lost souls was waiting for revelations, was hallucinating in it self.
What a great piece on Artaud is this and on the most exciting risk Western culture has taken. It seems to me that Western culture has forgotten this exciting risk, has fallen out of love with it. But that’s not so important.
The inoculation against dangerous ideas has failed, and it will fail again.
In the meantime, some of us express the inexpressible.