ARTAUD: BLOWS AND BOMBS: The Biography Of Antonin Artaud Read online

  Artaud’s work is always extremely conscious, intentional and wilful. This is one of the reasons why Artaud broke with André Breton’s Surrealism in the period leading up to 1926. It had been Breton, along with Philippe Soupault, who had produced the first example of ‘automatic writing’, The Magnetic Fields, in 1919. The process of writing, for Breton and Soupault, was left as far as possible to unconscious reflexes, and was subject to the suggestive juxtapositions of dream imagery. By contrast, the intention to lose control in life, to step back to survey the damage, then to probe the entire process and its results, is strongly present in Artaud’s writings. The relinquishment of any kind of control during the actual act of writing – even for the magical eruptions from the unconscious mind which Breton advocated – is relentlessly condemned.

  Artaud feared sleep, unconsciousness, drunkenness – states where control was lost, where a void might appear. The sense of self-control is what is so fascinating about Artaud’s approach to mental collapse. Madness becomes raw material to be treated with great irony and with great anger.

  The symptoms of schizophrenia, delirium and paranoia are viewed, assessed and incorporated into Artaud’s language. He pre-empts and negates the psychiatric profession’s view of his virulent attacks upon society. Psychiatry is an explicitly malicious institution for Artaud. In his recording To have done with the judgement of god, he reconstructs a dialogue between himself and the chief psychiatrist at Rodez, Dr Gaston Ferdière:

  –You are delirious, Monsieur Artaud. You are mad.

  –I am not delirious. I am not mad.

  Artaud’s approach to madness is manipulative in the extreme. It condenses psychiatric diagnoses and jargon into a flaccid rationale which can then be used to provide its own refutation, executed by Artaud with precision and assertive power. Too great a degree of agility and destructive delight exists in Artaud’s demolition of psychiatry for his work to be dismissed as a ‘délire de revendication’ (the French term introduced by Doctors Sérieux and Capgras for the language of a psychotic patient who reorganizes the world according to their own obsessed and fixated system). This kind of dismissal is what Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan undertook, albeit with a certain admiration, in order to theorize and reinforce their position around the writings of Judge Schreber (Freud and Lacan) and ‘Aimée’ (Lacan).

  Artaud’s total refusal of psychiatrically formulated madness is also an intense questioning of its constitution. With self-probing intricacy, Artaud’s refusal undermines and unscreens notions of psychosis. It blatantly uses madness, puts madness to work, to take apart its social structure and to produce a transmissible language from that process of disassembly. In Artaud’s final recording, this refusal of psychiatry probes and also screams.

  Artaud’s breakdown in 1937 and subsequent incarceration are always presented by him as a shattering. He was about to speak, to announce imminent transformations on physical, sexual and social levels – but was then silenced and suppressed. He presents his asylum internment as part of a malicious chain of suppressions which extends back from the police, doctors and administrative bodies who were directly involved in his arrest, to the theological, familial and political bodies which upheld it, and through which the concept of madness had its origin. It is this special sensitivity of Artaud’s writings towards a pervasive social complicity in individual repression which attracted ‘anti-psychiatrists’ such as David Cooper and R.D. Laing to them in the 1960s. Artaud’s reconstruction of the life of Vincent Van Gogh as a parallel to his own is the crucial material which attempts to give authenticity to his imagery of social murders and social suicides.

  Above all, Artaud denounced the brutality of psychiatry as it was practiced in the 1930s and 1940s, especially the fifty-one electroshock treatments to which he was subjected by Dr Ferdière at Rodez. This denunciation also proved fertile for the Lettrist movement in Paris. Its leader, Isidore Isou, was also a patient of Ferdière following Isou’s enthusiastic participation in the May 1968 riots in Paris. Isou, together with another Lettrist, Maurice Lemaître, wrote a fiercely polemical book, Antonin Artaud Tortured by the Psychiatrists (1970), which – among a swarm of outrageous insults – accuses the ‘Nazi-psychiatrist’ Ferdière of being a pornographer and drug addict, and ‘one of the greatest criminals in the entire history of humanity, a new Eichmann’.[5] Isou and Lemaître’s aim was not entirely gratuitous provocation; they also proposed a new science of the mind to supersede psychoanalysis, called ‘Psychokladology’ – this science would employ every branch of poetic and scientific knowledge to combat individual alienation and fragmentation of the self. For Artaud, however, fragmentation is not to be combated – it is itself a weapon, with which to attack and dismantle social systems and languages, and by which the body operates a reclamation of the silenced self.

  This dismantling, and the interpenetration of creative and analytical writing, is reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s work. Some connections (notably, the concern with disunity and multiplicity, and the conflict between surface and interior) are evident between the works of Artaud and Lacan. But, in the contact they had during the period 1938-9, the two men were unambiguously hostile. Artaud was at that time an inmate of the Henri-Rousselle clinic at the Sainte-Anne asylum in Paris, where Lacan was in charge of diagnosing patients and arranging for their transfer to other asylums.

  Artaud’s close friend Roger Blin (who later directed the plays which made Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet internationally famous) went to see Lacan to discuss Artaud’s treatment with him. Lacan told Blin that Artaud’s case did not interest him, that Artaud was ‘fixed’[6] and that he would live to be eighty, but would never write another line. In fact, Artaud barely lived to be fifty, and in his remaining ten prolific years produced several times the amount of work than in his life up to the internment period. In later years, Lacan would warn his followers and students against ‘inflaming themselves’ in Artaud’s manner; if they did display such passion, they should be ‘calmed down’.[7] Artaud was unequivocally contemptuous of his treatment at Sainte-Anne. (Ironically, one of the alleyways in the huge complex is now named ‘rue Antonin Artaud’.) He claimed to have been held in solitary confinement there, silenced and even systematically poisoned. Since no precise diagnosis was made about his condition at Sainte-Anne (beyond that he was chronically and incurably insane), Artaud was sent to the even vaster asylum of Ville-Évrard, in the eastern suburbs of Paris. During his stay there, he was constantly transferred between wards, from the maniacs’ ward to the epileptics’ ward, from the cripples’ ward to the undesirables’ ward. The work produced after Artaud’s release from internment is insurgent – it breaks silence, and screams against psychiatric medicine, profoundly questioning its basis.

  Though Artaud was born in the south of France, in the huge Mediterranean port and linguistic crucible of Marseilles, his life was bound to Paris. His journeys and internments all involved an ultimate return to Paris, undertaken with both attraction and resistance. The areas of Paris most evocative of Artaud’s presence are the boulevard du Montparnasse in the 1920s and 1930s, and the boulevard Saint Germain in the final period of 1946-8. Many of his writings were produced in the great literary cafes – the Flore, the Coupole, the Dôme – which formed the core of a particularly gregarious milieu that no longer exists in Paris. Even in the self-imposed solitude of his final Paris period, Artaud spent many of his nights writing in the Saint Germain-des-Prés cafes – sometimes alone, and hostile to interruption, but often in the company of his small group of friends, including Roger Blin and Arthur Adamov. The names of Parisian districts and streets are pervasive in Artaud’s later texts, strategically displaced where necessary. Van Gogh the Suicide of Society ends with the evocation of a huge rock blown from a volcano (an image for Artaud’s own body), which lands at the junction of the boulevard de la Madeleine and the rue des Mathurins, two streets which do not geographically intersect. Artaud’s relationship with Paris was disruptive and confrontational.


  Both in his writings and performances, he attacked and enlivened the city in which his work was published and witnessed. At the end of his life, Artaud came to an uneasy compromise with Paris, living in the grounds of a convalescence home in the city’s periphery, at Ivry-sur-Seine. Maintaining a cold distance from the literary and social worlds which he believed had enmeshed and rejected him in the 1930s, Artaud was nevertheless positioned for regular denunciatory incursions into the city’s life.

  Although, in general, Artaud manifested extreme hostility towards his contemporaries, he lived through periods of great artistic productivity and experimentation in Paris: the 1920s with Surrealism, and the period 1946-8 with its many artistic and philosophical movements that emerged in part from the excitement of the liberation from Nazi occupation in 1944.

  Artaud came into close proximity with many of the greatest artists and writers of the twentieth century: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Gide, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille, among others. Occasionally, valuable collaborations resulted from these contacts, not least in the field of interaction between the text and the image. But Artaud could be summarily dismissive of his famous contemporaries. His friend Jacques Prevel reported that Artaud ‘abominated’ Jean-Paul Sartre.[8] And he seems to have taken no notice whatsoever of the work of Jean Genet (active in Paris during Artaud’s last period there, but probably stigmatized in Artaud’s perception through his association with Sartre), nor of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, despite the fact that they shared the same young and adventurous publisher, Robert Denoël, for both of their first large-scale works, Artaud’s 1934 biography of the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and Céline’s 1932 novel Journey to the End of the Night.

  Artaud receptively experienced wild and strange times in his life, and his work underwent the seismic shudders of a multiple cultural revolution in terms of the text, the body and the machine. But Artaud could also abdicate himself from world events, and exile himself into the interior impulses of his own body and his creative activities. He lived through both world wars, the first (from the ages of eighteen to twenty-two) partly as a sanatorium patient and partly as a somnambulistic soldier, the second (from the ages of forty-three to forty-nine) entirely as a mental hospital patient. He participated in no social or military conflicts, and wrote in response to a newspaper questionnaire about the Moroccan conflict of 1925: ‘The war, that of Morocco or any other, appears to me exclusively a question of flesh.’[9] During the same period, his disagreement with Breton over the Surrealist movement’s affiliation to the French Communist Party was motivated largely by their divergence of response to the term ‘revolution’. For Artaud, the contents of the unconscious mind could never be applied to political and social arenas without, firstly, a drastic anatomical transformation. All of Artaud’s rapports with social and cultural institutions were disrupted by this preoccupying imagery of an individual human body in a process of grinding metamorphosis. In Artaud’s writings, culture and nature are amalgamated, crushed and brought down to a zero point. They are subjugated to a physical activity which must be set into movement before any other living structure may exist. The body comes before the word, and before the world.

  Artaud’s life was great tragedy – terrible failure upon failure, suppression after suppression. But he possessed a magisterial and monumental capacity for reactivation and reinvention. After each catastrophe, his tenacious proposals for the gestural life of the body were overhauled and presented in an entirely new way. His Surrealist work of the 1920s attempted experiments on consciousness through cinematic and poetic work. After the collapse of Artaud’s projects for Surrealism, his work re-evolved into the theatrical space. There, the body’s tightly controlled and expansively exaggerated gestures, in theatrical performance, aimed to seize the potential for an overwhelming expressivity, using an imagery of blood, disease, death and fire. Once that option had been closed to Artaud by the constraints of the 1930s Parisian theatre, he initiated his great creative journeys, making Mexico and Ireland the sites for an exploration of destructive rituals centred on the body. The first journey ended in disillusionment, and the second in asylum internment.

  The final resurgence of Artaud’s life, with his release from Rodez, produced an enormous and diverse amount of work. It crossed the borders between disciplines, with the result that a great body of provocative and challenging material was created. The last period is an intensification of all Artaud’s previous production. It has a final clarity which is both disciplined and feral. The trajectory of Artaud’s life and work, including the Theatre of Cruelty proposals and the Surrealist writings, cannot be fully understood without its final perspective and its impact of elucidation. This last work extends from public performances, to recordings which were intended for radio transmission, to texts which were published in mass-circulation newspapers. Artaud’s theatrical manifestoes of the 1930s, in their collected form, have been subject to numerous critical recuperations which have, to some extent, diminished their virulence. The last work, by contrast, is dispersed and largely unknown: it demands rediscovery.

  The life and work of Antonin Artaud interrogate the role of the fragmented but transforming body, in art, literature and performance – within chance and necessity, within damage and reconstitution. The lucid and challenging body-in-movement which Artaud projected remains a figure emphasizing regeneration and the reassertion of liberty. It is an inspiration for whoever now makes new and vital images of the human body, against what Artaud saw as its fearful, static sickness.

  Notes

  [1] Koseki, in L’Autre Journal, Paris, 26 March 1986, p.55.

  [2] Collected in Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, Seuil, Paris, 1967; English translations are collected in Writing and Difference, Routledge, New York, 1978.

  [3] Antonin Artaud: Dessins et Portraits (ed. Paule Thévenin), Gallimard, Paris, 1986.

  [4] Collected in Kristeva, Polylogue, Seuil, Paris, 1977; an English translation is collected in The Tel Quel Reader (ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack), Routledge, New York, 1998.

  [5] Lettrisme, Paris, 1970, p.141.

  [6] Blin, Souvenirs et Propos, Gallimard, Paris, 1986, p.32.

  [7] Lacan, Raison d’un échec (1967), in Scilicet, no.1, Paris, 1968, p.50.

  [8] Prevel, En Compagnie d’Antonin Artaud, Flammarion, Paris, 1974, p.36.

  [9] Oeuvres Complètes, Gallimard, Paris, 1948-93 (hereafter: OC), VII, 1982, p.309.

  Chapter One : Surrealism and the Void

  Artaud believed that every birth coincides with a killing.

  Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud was born at eight in the morning of 4 September 1896, at 15 rue du Jardin des Plantes, near the Marseilles zoo. The rue du Jardin des Plantes has since been renamed the rue des Trois Frères Carasso. Artaud himself, on many occasions, was to change and distort the name under which he was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church. He adopted numerous pseudonyms, such as Eno Dailor for some of his early Surrealist texts.

  Before his journey to Ireland in 1937, he styled himself ‘The Revealed One’ in his prophetic book The New Revelations of Being. During the same period, he declared: ‘My name must disappear’,[1] and he answered to no name at all for the first period of his asylum internment. At the asylum of Ville-Évrard, he adopted his mother’s maiden name and asserted that his name was Antonin Nalpas. After his release from the asylums and his return to Paris in 1946, Artaud took for himself the nickname ‘le Mômo’ (Marseilles slang for a fool or village idiot), and he distorted his surname to ‘outo’ and ‘Totaud’. Finally, he came to terms with having a name derived from his father’s name, Antoine Roi Artaud (Antonin is a diminutive, ‘little Anthony’), and from those of the parents of Jesus Christ. In his last writings, he was able to weld his name, which he felt he had finally won for himself, to imagery of an explosive identity:

  Who am I?

  Where do I come from?

  I am Antonin Artaud

  and I say
this

  as I know how to say this

  immediately

  you will see my present body

  burst into fragments

  and remake itself

  under ten thousand notorious aspects

  a new body

  where you will

  never forget me. [2]

  Artaud’s family origins were dispersed across the Mediterranean, from France to Greece and Turkey. His childhood in the great European-African-Asian trading port of Marseilles exposed him to a fertile crisscrossing of languages, dialects and gestural signs which resonate in his multilingual texts. His father ran a shipping company until its financial collapse in 1909, and was often absent on trading journeys during Artaud’s childhood; he died in 1924 when Artaud was twenty-seven years old and on the point of adhering to the Surrealist group. His mother, a Levantine Greek, had a great number of children of whom only Artaud, one sister and one brother survived infancy; she died in 1952, having outlived her first child, Antonin. The family atmosphere was deeply restrictive, heated and religious. In family photographs, Antonin appears bewildered. Later in life, from his time at the asylum of Rodez until his death, he elaborated an alternative, oppositional family, entirely female, which he called his ‘daughters of the heart to be born’. This sexually charged grouping was composed both from imaginary elements and from women Artaud had known during the course of his life. The only members of his actual family to be included were his beloved and sympathetic grandmothers, Catherine and Neneka, who had been sisters. As Artaud’s daughters, they were genealogically inverted from their familial position, to be reborn as Artaud’s courageous, erotic warrior-children.

  At the age of four years, Antonin had a severe attack of meningitis. The family and their doctor assumed it was due to the child having fallen on his head, and he was not expected to survive. The virus gave Antonin a nervous, irritable temperament throughout adolescence. He also suffered from neuralgia and stammering. His school years in Marseilles were consequently difficult and unsuccessful. At the age of seventeen, he underwent a crisis of depression, causing him to burn the poetry which he had been writing for around four years, and to abandon school before taking the leaving certificate, the baccalauréat. During his time at Rodez in the 1940s, when Artaud was systematically reinventing his past life, he often wrote of an episode from this period, in which he had been stabbed in the back by a pimp outside a church in Marseilles. At Rodez, he claimed that the attack was the manifestation of a malicious social and religious will, and that he still had a scar from the stab wound. If the narrated event relates to an actual event, it seems likely to have been the result of an altercation between a hoodlum in that violent city and an inexperienced youth looking for sexual or narcotic adventure. Shortly afterwards, Artaud’s parents arranged for the first in a long series of sanatorium stays for their disruptive son.