the intelligible never existed one does not understand anything or learn anything
Antonin Artaud, a French writer whose parents were Greeks from Smyrna, is best known for his theories about a Theatre of Cruelty, which would be an assault on its audience, occurring ideally in a rough barn of a space, in which the audience would occupy the centre and the actors the edge, whose words would have the visceral force of mucus or blood. Artaud has a vision of the actor projecting a vein of air into theatrical space which makes it sound like a spout or eruption. Language, theatre, thought as commonly known do not go far enough; when art is authentic it springs from pain and inflicts pain, not arbitrarily but in pursuit of the real.
Most people’s first encounter with Artaud probably comes in an early silent film, Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc of 1928, where he makes a striking appearance as a monk with an intense stare, whose silence suggests something more alarming than a technical shortcoming of the new medium of film. He had already been introduced to opium by a doctor who used it to deal with his patient’s longstanding mental instability, a combination of forces that led to his confinement in a series of asylums, after disastrous trips to Mexico and Ireland in pursuit of cosmic visions that would give meaning to his addiction.
Under the tolerant regime of an asylum found for him by friends in Rodez, Artaud was given shock treatments which got him writing again after a long silence. Over the next four years until his death in 1948 he filled over 400 school exercise books with a torrent of poetry, curses, spells, boasts, complaints and addresses wrapped round or erupting in mysterious drawings in heavy black pencil on almost every page.
Through an initiative of the Cabinet Gallery in Vauxhall, a selection of around 80 of these notebooks (now kept in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris) were brought to London and beautifully and confusingly laid out in the main space at the gallery.
Visitors were supplied with an elegant plan of this trapezoidal space showing seven large glass cases ranged irregularly in the middle of the room and 13 smaller ones lining the edges. The large cases (all but one of them) contained 6 notebooks each, the smaller ones three, each open on a pair of pages. The cases were numbered, but only on the handout. The notebooks are already numbered in chronological sequence, though Artaud didn’t always write in just one notebook at a time. These numbers were also found on the handout, but nowhere near the notebooks.
During most of the run, there was a parallel exhibition on the floor below of works inspired by Artaud, and for this another handout was supplied, with another clear plan of the space, but for some reason this plan was inverted, and its top corresponded to the bottom of the other plan, a puzzle it took me a while to work out, as it did to link the translations mounted on the walls to the notebooks far away in the centre of the room.
The link between madness and poetry was noticed by the Greeks, by Shakespeare and by the Romantics in the 19th century. Lear’s ravings on the heath are widely regarded as among the most profound utterances in all of literature, exposing the limits of ordinary logic and consecutive reasoning. But they are only an approximation, Shakespeare’s brilliant representation of what the speech of genuine madness might sound like. Artaud’s outpourings promise to be the real thing, their very voluminousness a warrant of their unstoppable, uncontrollable authenticity, compelled out of their transcriber like the endless stream of word-like sounds coming from a fundamentalist Christian speaking in tongues.
It can’t be quite as simple as that. There’s something wonderfully unpredictable about where Artaud’s words will take him next, but they are usually words not gibberish, though it is true they often leave out accents, apostrophes and the like, and give signs of being put down in a frenzy of excitement. You soon come to feel that you need to see the original form of the page with all its illegibility, its crowding and bumping into a drawing, or sloping up to avoid it, the changes in size, the lines at right angles to others, but almost always it still looks like text, not random scattered marks. And there are nonsense syllables, generally spaced more generously, suggesting a conscious striving for effect, so you wouldn’t say the words break down into nonsense, but that they divert or erupt into it. You would like to hear how Artaud might read those parts—would he scream them, or roar them? He was famous for the bloodcurdling screams that punctuated his last public performances. Probably the nonsense syllables didn’t or weren’t meant to punctuate, but rather to disrupt and destroy sense for that moment at least.
For Artaud the idea of speech as bodily isn’t just a metaphor. He goes on talking about needing to re-construct his own body himself, without help, or imagines that certain unnamed beings are stealing his organs or his food or gaining entry to him because the effect of heroin has worn off and left him open to being penetrated. The idea that bodies are not as separate or bounded as most people think is perhaps easier for the regular drug user to imagine, when he has just been introducing substances into his body which have noticeably violent effects, effects it does not feel that he is willing or controlling.
My encounter with Artaud has lasted much longer than I intended, but hasn’t been a descent into a dark night of the soul, but more like trying to solve a tantalising jigsaw puzzle, or chasing without ever actually laying hands on it, an unencompassable work of art, unfinished and unfinishable.
Part of the appeal of this work is how hard it is to get hold of, physically as well as imaginatively. Matching the text and the images is the essential pursuit with Artaud, as it is with Blake, but so far it is only do-able up to a point. Only the notebooks from Artaud’s last year have been transcribed in the order of the books themselves, and published in a beautiful Gallimard edition in 2 volumes of 2342 pages, which omit anything that has already appeared elsewhere–including drafts of letters, the van Gogh text and much else, listed in an elaborate appendix to vol 2. Most disappointing of all, these volumes leave out the drawings, except for poor postage-stamp reproductions of a few pages from each notebook tacked on the end of each text (which is to say, in 173 separate locations). Even that much is welcome, but gives only a dim idea of the entanglement of text and drawings throughout the work.
The parallel with Blake seems obvious and essential, a parallel including the attempt to erect a private, homemade cosmology, more sustained and worked out in Blake, more fluid and intermittent in Artaud. Both of them end up sounding like the Bible or an archaic Gilgamesh-style epic when describing the hostilities that fill their entire mental space from time to time, much more obviously derived from passing subjective pressures in Artaud. Seeing the two of them together one can imagine filling in the missing stages between private obsession and old mythic material distorted into more personalised forms. Artaud externalises visceral agonies to combat them in what feels like an emergency. Blake has had the mental space or freedom to work his alarms up into characters with names and personal histories different from his. Nothing in Artaud ever strays far from parts of the self, and in his greatest leaps he seems to be personifying his own organs or internal sensations. Strangest and most modern of all, he reads or re-forms himself as various machines, not always whole machines but parts, as if staking out a kind of freedom in such alienated transformations.
This vision of the self as disarticulated parts or fragments bears a strange resemblance to the reader’s experience of Artaud’s enormous production, which can only reach us in bits, loaded with rebarbative apparatus. It seems that it is a book (though not really a book) which will always subsist as 406 sub-books, a disarticulation it will never shake off, which is in fact its proudest boast, that it has miraculously kept all its parts, but can never be detached from them and become a single entity. Someone could make a facsimile of all 406, not bound as one, but numbered and kept in a box. Next to it would sit the big volumes of a complete transcription, for no one would get far with Artaud’s intermittently legible words without that.
What a horrific vision. One does not want them accessible so cumbersomely. Better that the little notebooks should be scattered strategically across a big white space and that their sequence should be as hard to fathom as it was in Vauxhall. One can only dream of working through those thousands of scribbled pages, glimpsed behind plexiglas. Artaud is one of the great exemplars of the beauty and freshness of the non sequitur, of the fertility of the fragment, and in Vauxhall, even with repeated sightings, one understood or rather glimpsed something, but nothing like the whole of it.
Plans of the two spaces in Vauxhall: Artaud notebooks, Works inspired by Artaud
Previous images: Notebook 171, nb 351, Vauxhall display overview, nb 299, nb 393 single page w nonsense words, nb 313, nb 296
I was helped with some difficult pages of French by Irénée Scalbert.
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