The Reinvention Of The Human Faceby Donald Gardner
'The human face
is an empty power, a
field of death ...
... after countless thousands of years
that the human face has spoken
and breathed
one still has the impression
that it hasn't even begun to
say what it is and what it knows.'
Antonin Artaud, from a text to introduce an exhibition of his portraits and drawings, Galerie Pierre, July 1947.
i
It is difficult to say anything unique or original about Antonin Artaud who, after his death, first in the sixties and now again two decades later, has become such a celebrity that everyone seems obliged to have an opinion of him. That is why I found the intention of this series of talks attractive: the idea of one winter talking about another in the form of a more or less personal report inspired by admiration or love. And it remains attractive, although I must say that I don't think it can so easily be reduced to a case of me, Donald Gardner, actor and poet, talking about Antonin Artaud, also actor and poet, not to mention sufferer, path-breaker and reinventor of the human face, who died when I was 9, a time of my life when I had to endure deliriums and sleepwalkings in the cold dormitory of my English boarding school. From the school windows on a clear day you could see the French coast, so that I am tempted to fantasize that some vibrations of poor Artaud did cross the Channel and plant themselves in my forebrain the day he died. March 4, 1948 - of cancer of the rectum, an organ that figured centrally in his work. I can claim that, a couple of years later, also in bed in that same school, I heard the explosion of one of the first nuclear bombs on Bikini Atoll and that the windows shook from this event the other side of the world, a kind of experience, the verity of which I would however be at a loss to know how to prove, that was in some way similar to the one that Artaud described in his great text on Van Gogh, whose neck they or their fathers so well wrung when he was alive.
'Concerning Van Gogh. magic and spells, all the people who have paraded before the exhibition of his works at the Orangerie for the last two months are they really sure to remember all they did and everything that happened to them every night of the months of February, March, April and May 1956? Could there not have been one particular night when the atmosphere and the streets became liquid, gelatinous, unstable. and when the light of the stars and the celestial vault disappeared? And Van Gogh was not there, he who painted the Arles Café. But I was at Rodez, that is to say, still on earth, while all the inhabitants of Paris must have felt, all one night, very close to leaving it. And was this not because they had participated in unison in certain generalized dirty tricks, when the consciousness of Parisians left its normal level for an hour or two and proceeded to another one, one of those mass unfurlings of hatred dirty tricks, or two and proceeded to another one, one of those mass unfurlings of hatred which I have witnessed so many times during my nine years of internment. Now hatred is forgotten like the nocturnal expurgations that follow, and the same ones who so many times bared their swinish souls to the whole world now file past But was it not one of those evenings I have been talking about, that an enormous white stone fell on the Boulevard de la Madeleine at the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. as if shot from a recent volcanic eruption of the volcano Popocatepetl?'1
This kind of personal approach, however, too easily degenerates into sentimentality or an anecdotal mode, or even in the case of the great, despised dead into necrophilia. (Try seeing necrophilia from the point of view of the corpse!) Moreover Artaud himself, above all towards the end of his life, was only interested in hacking out the territory of the impersonal. Fallen star as he was, the magnetisms that fascinated him were not those of sentimental liaisons, but rather more universal attractions. Increasingly as his work matured you can see in it an almost scientific preoccupation with matters that are not normally considered reducible to this kind of investigation. Even his obsession with himself, so striking right from the beginning of his career, that he reveals in his correspondence with the critic and editor Jacques Rivière in which he tries to describe the deficiency of his thought process cannot be labelled as subjectivity or narcissism, but was rather prompted by a sense of the uniqueness and, at the same time, typicality of this fissure in consciousness.2 I should mention at this point that there is a continuity and development in Artaud's work right up to those magnificent, often fragmentary, last poems and texts that, if read in a certain spirit, can send shivers of recognition down one's spine . What makes him unique to my mind is his genius not just in wresting something from disaster but in actually turning it inside out and making of it the very substance of his work as though disaster and nothing less was a sort of touchstone for reality and truth in a work. It needs to be stressed that his work did not degenerate as a result of his clinical madness. Rather, like no other artist, he succeeded in incorporating madness into his work in a way that gave it a gestalt and coherence. In the end what we have of him is not so much a personality, however distinguished, but something like a tattered flag, blowing in the wind, unforgettable, marking off a certain territory of mind. In this sense, by the creation of a kind of impersonal spleandour in which life and work were inseparable, he may be said to have achieved what he set out to do and conquered even death. Or as the French director, Roger Blin, said of him so beautifully: 'I know Antonin Artaud only through his trajectory in me which is endless.'3 The problem, then, for an artist or writer who is influenced by Artaud is precisely that of stopping short of identification. The didactic and passionate nature of his thought would seem to draw the reader into it like a vortex. Yet Artaud's whole project was the recreation of himself as an inviolable individual: the restructuring of his own identity by way of a drastic confrontation with the void that terrified a and magnetized him at the same time. With his final insistence on the body as the bedrock of experience, Artaud might serve as an antidote to guru-ism. Typical of of our age, riddled through and through with anxiety as it is, where the motor power of the human imagination seems to pulse like a heart that sometimes misses a beat, is the tendency to form cults or follow leaders It is not surprising, then, that young artists have tended to fetishize or make a cult of Artaud and his work, above all of his madness. Anaïs Nin, in her diaries, was the first to draw attention to this; her criticism of the Californian beats was just that, that they loved his madness, rather than understanding him as an artist.4 I think myself that this fetishizing of his madness is precisely an avoidance of really looking at it, at the reality of it and its integral place in Artaud's works, born as they were out of an immensity of suffering, both mental and physical. The academic or university-based critic has the opposite problem. (For many recent writers, academic criticism itself presents a problem, as if the possibilities for a writer with all their variety and intricacy have been mapped out before s/he ever begins to put a word on paper. One of the major areas of freedom is in this way excluded for the modern writer: the field of artistic innocence. One is reminded of those children growing up in the city who have never seen a cow! Without this possibility of innocence it is questionable how any creative renewal can occur. But maybe that is precisely the point of academic criticism!) In any case, imagine you are such a critic and that you are sitting at your desk writing, and that you steal a glance in the mirror and see instead of your own familiar form that you have developed a hairy forearm like a baboon, and/or that instead of your much loved and trusty countenance you have the head of a gryphon or a cheetah! What then will you write? Things aren't always what they seem. What I am trying to find a way of saying is that the presumption of objectivity inherent in academic criticism is inadequate to dealing with a figure such as Artaud. Although his collected works have been published by Gallimard in, nota bene, 19 volumes thus guaranteeing him an honourable place in French literature, Artaud himself very clearly in text after text placed himself outside that bookish tradition. In his approach to language he gave the spoken word a crucial primacy over the written. His whole career, moreover, resists classification. How can he be described? As poet or as actor? As occultist or as polemicist against all forms of mysticism? As theatre director or as philosopher or as a theoretician of aesthetics? The concept of the objective point of view splinters when confronted with the protean variety of his work. With his syncretic energy, Artaud represents a new kind of cultural figure, a fact that explains why he continues to remain not only attractive but also profoundly disturbing decades after his death. This is finally what I want to make the subject of this paper. To explain just why Artaud was so fascinating for the generation of cultural explosion of the late sixties, and why I think he remains relevant and timely still, now nearly 20 years after the first publication of the City Lights Artaud Anthology, despite all attempts to tidy up after the movement of that time, and despite that other more subtle disclaimer that an his ideas have now been worked out in practice on the stages of the west and that he can now be safely confined once more to that category called history, a dead category in other words.
ii
I want to take a good look at this very common assumption of critics and others that have just mentioned, that Artaud's theoretical programme has now been so thoroughly put into practice on the stages of the west that we might as well all go back to our quiet homes in Hamsterdam, city of a diligent and industrious folk, where apparently 6% of job openings come in the sector called Art, and where, significantly, the profits that accrue go mainly to the Horeca industry, a fact that gives a new turn to the old truth that without food there can be no art. How marvellously we are screened here from war, famines and plagues. Every evening this sense of a blessed dispensation is confirmed in us by the sight on t.v. of these same calamities occurring somewhere else, a sight which paradoxically because it is so appalling feels distant enough from our reality to serve like nothing else to guarantee us a good night's rest. It really is true that we live here in the best of all possible worlds; and even though we do have the odd complaint or two, the chances are that they will only be minor ones, and that there will be agencies, subdivisions of the sociale dienst or the huisvesting, or buro's van rechtshulp, and so on, to enable us to redress them. That this recognition arouses in us no deep surge of feeling, no abnormal display of local patriotism if we happen to be a Hamsterdammer, no effusion of gratitude if we are one of those fortunate foreigners who have swum to enable us to redress them. That this recognition arouses in us no deep surge of feeling, no abnormal display of local patriotism if we happen to be a Hamsterdarmner, no effusion of gratitude if we are one of those fortunate foreigners who have swum to these shores, but at most only the thin smile of self-satisfaction, should hardly surprise us. The cat has got his cream and, what's more, he may drink it up without having to look over his shoulder in case another cat steals it from him. Of course egotism and greed continue to flourish in their socially accepted forms. Somehow a cat will glance anxiously round, just in case. And the smile turns out to be little more than a mask hiding who knows what depths and convulsions of anxiety. It is as though having succeeded in quarantining ourselves away from all wars and plagues, they somehow continue to exist in another more shadowy form, as buried mental states continually threatening to erupt. In this sense Artaud, who described himself as 'the man who has best charted his inmost self, his most imperceptible slitherings', may still be of interest to us. It goes without saying that there have been directors and actors who have been inspired by Artaud's work over the past 40 years. There were even a long time ago, in the sixties, one or two productions that questioned the accepted order of things in such a way to create a furore. I remember myself the Living Theatre's Frankenstein which really did have an Artaudian combination of wildness and rigour, while at the same time being so clearly the creation of the glint in Julian Beck's eye, bearing the imprint of his and Judith Malina's crusading passion. I think also of the production of the Constant Prince directed by Jerzy Grotowski that I saw in London, where the audience had to witness this spectacle of mysticism and sexual cruelty from narrow pew-like benches with a wooden board in front of them just high enough for us to lean our chins on, forcing us to the recognition that voyeurism is also an act of participation and that brothel and church are sister forms. It is, simply stated, impossible to imagine the modern theatre without Artaud. From the French directors of the fifties who knew him personally, down to Gerardjan Reijnders' elegant exposé of the forces of unreason, in the Carré Theatre in the Bacchanten, it is hard to think of a director of any stature who has not directly or obliquely been influenced by Artaud's ideas. Yet we have to admit that in this flurry of total theatre that our generation has witnessed something usually seems to be missing, and it is always, predictably, just that element that makes a work confrontational or truly disturbing. For one thing, Artaud's texts bristle with ideas, but they do not provide us with a method. There is no school of acting that derives from his name. Maybe it is even an evasion of the issue to discuss whether his influence on modern theatre has run its course: a concentration on symptoms instead of focusing on what our age actually demands. In a way, the discussion of influences is beside the point. What Artaud did was to introduce certain new criteria, not so much for aesthetic form, but, more disturbingly, for what a work of art is. All his work, not just The theatre and its double. but also the later texts and poems prowl round and round the whole question of artistic sincerity and of what truth is in a work. His struggle was with principles rather than with forms, and there are enough hints in his writings that suggest that he was seeking to go beyond the bounds of art. His criticism of the ballets russes, that splendid though the spectacle was, it remained within the bounds of art, this same criticism can be made of the theatre of Peter Brook or Gerardjan Reijnders. The visionary energy drains away in the domain where the work is presented, that of the cultural élite. The same can be said of the scale of this kind of work. Artaud was certainly not lacking in ambition, but his practical experience was always small-scale, in the experimental theatres of his time. 'One runs risks', he wrote, 'but I consider that in present-day conditions they are worth running. I do not believe we have succeeded in reanimating the world we live in and I also do not believe it worth hanging on to. But I propose something to get us out of the slump, instead of continuing to moan about it, about the boredom, dullness and stupidity of everything.'5 In practice, however, Artaud did not so much provide solutions as raise certain questions. Somehow it is this incompleteness, this lack-of-having-been-worked-out that means that his work still makes demands on us. Moreover his vision was of a work of such incandescence that the audience would, as it were, be alchemically transformed by it. Which of us has not asked that question and has realized how difficult it is to answer: which work of art has changed our lives? Not so much that the works that come to mind are incomplete or flawed but rather that at a certain crucial point they fail to deliver the decisive blows, or that they retreat into a merely formal excellence, or, to use a phrase of Cocteau's, they do not make the effort to know 'up to what point they could push further'. What, however, is striking is that this is a question that we have come to ask, and that in our age this is somewhere the demand that we have come to make of a work of art. Artaud's genius for me, and the reason why his influence is not yet played out, so that he transcends artistic and cultural fashions, consists in the courage with which he returned again and again to this thematic of the transformation of life. The theatre that claims to derive from Artaud has, by and large, stopped short of this extremism. It has rarely been motivated by this abrasive spirit of criticism which is basic energizing feature of all his work. As a result it has often done exactly what he denounced and concentrated only on the formal aspects of what now carries the jargon term 'total theatre'. Theatregoers will all be familiar with certain 'productions' where a fanfare of portentousness will be sounded every time the interest flags, in order to herald a supposedly deep metaphysical theme, that director and actors have sweated like demons to uncover. Artaud on the contrary, addressed himself to life first. It was in relation to the general collapse that he saw in social values and norms, that he called for a change in the theatre. He found the theatre around him backward. irrelevant and academic, out of touch with what was going on in society. In the equation life/theatre, life was for him the first term; but the chemical element, if you like, the catalyst for change, was to come from the theatre. This is what so clearly distinguishes him from his contemporaries who called for a political revolution. To quote from his text on Theatre and science, which is a late work, after his time in the asylums:
'And no political or moral revolution will be
possible
so long as man continues to be magnetically held down -
even in his most elementary and simple organic and nervous reactions -
by the sordid influence
of all the questionable centers of the Initiates,
who, sitting tight in the warmth of the electric blankets o
of their duality schism
laugh at revolutions as well as wars,
certain that the anatomic order on which the
existence as well as the duration of actual society is based
will no longer know how to be changed.'6
And yet what he was calling for was revolution, no more no less. And he saw theatre as the carrier par excellence of this revolution. There was a two-edged weapon. On the one hand it had the simple power to embody dreams. On the other, this power serves to provoke in the public a divine discontent and thus the very existence of theatre secretes a criticism of life as it is currently lived. In his view theatre could only work so to intensify people's longing that life as it is lived would be revealed as intolerable and the conditions would be ready for the generation of a new 'risen state of body'. Put this way, his vision may sound like the ravings of a naive innocent or, indeed, a madman. However, our inability to conceive of a work of art as being able possess such power may only be an indication of how deeply the process of alienation has worked itself into the body of our culture. If we compare his time with ours, the beleaguered but lively, quarrelsome avant-garde of the early thirties, existing in a context of conspicuous danger, a world dominated by slump and the rise of fascism, with ours, the mid-eighties, where the avant- garde h as become institutionalized, the domain of a specialized élite, a situation which finds its parallel in a kind of deep freeze in the social body, where cold war and the threat of total destruction numb our brains and cauterize the life of our feelings, making the idea of radical change almost unthinkable, we may begin to understand why the kernel of Artaud's thought has become so inaccessible. Even his fame seals him off from us. We may even conclude that his project belongs to the realm of beautiful utopias that cannot be fulfilled. We might abandon all dreams of greatness and content ourselves with 'dallying with forms'. Alternatively we might remind ourselves of the figure of the Viceroy of Cagliari, Saint Rémy's in Artaud's essay on The theatre and the plague, that magnetic, despotic, apparently arbitrary figure, who foresaw in a dream that the ship, the Grand Saint-Antoine, was infested with the plague and backed by the threat of cannon fire drove it away from the port of Cagliari. The captain is a thinly disguised double for Artaud - a characteristic expression of anarchism and despotism - and his hypersensitive sense of urgency was Artaud's own. We may find in ourselves a similar sense of urgency: the solutions we resort to will have to be our own.
iii
The field of culture is not a neutral zone. In every generation it is a terrain can be seen as one that must be contested, to be lost or won. Some of us sense it is not existence but consciousness that is at stake in our time - not so much the threat to human life from nuclear war, but that other danger masked by this crude threat, that of the submergence of consciousness - in other words, of living life, life infested with awareness of itself. This is the field of culture. It can also be thought of as an arena. In the world of culture there are reactionary movements as well as progressive ones, even though these terms are rather more delicate of application, and may even signify something fairly different from what they do in the political struggle. It must be said, however, that an attempt to revitalize certain dead cultural forms and the contentless mannerism of so much contemporary art has some relation with the tide of right-wing governments and with the economic squeeze. Because this tendency involves 'going with the tide' it does not have to provide much overt justification for itself. It is correspondingly difficult to pin down. The results in theatre cannot simply be listed on the fingers of a hand. For instance, there is a retreat behind the proscenium arch; and there is a certain fetishizing of the author, a propagating of the play script as independent phenomenon, but this isn't something that happens everywhere; the retreat is often more subtly masked: there can exist a proscenium arch in the brain, even when the outward form looks experimental. What often occurs is an obsession with expensive accessories, such as video monitors, or with theatre as an image-producing form, rather than one of movement, of confrontation, of agon. The question of acting is crucially avoided, or else focusing on technique or on a narrow concept of professionality is used as an alibi for side-stepping the whole discussion of what acting is in this time. Parallel to this is an uncoupling of theatre from life. Particularly strange and unnerving here (in Amsterdam) is the taking for granted of theatre as a given cultural form. You get the feeling of an attitude that there always has been a theatre and that there always will. A certain air of timelessness hangs over even the more experimental work done here: a vital dynamic is missing, a fact that can most clearly be seen in the absence of the sense of the need to seek new audiences. I do not mean to stray too far from Artaud. In the sense that Artaud was a visionary and utopian figure who himself very clearly intended to go beyond the bounds of art, it might be inappropriate to get bogged down in a discussion of contemporary theatre. However, the fact that his work is critical as well as utopian means that it is still possible to use it as a yardstick when we confront our own cultural reality. I always have the sense reading him that he is an ally or forerunner. In the last part of this talk I want to focus on the theme suggested by the title, 'the reinvention of the human face'. I want to stress that Artaud, while he was clearly no humanist, was very definitely a utopian artist. In other words, he wasn't interested in traditional human values, but with starting from scratch, starting all over. I want to emphasize this aspect of him, as against the picture that is usually given of him as the last of the poètes maudits'. It is true that he is in the lineage of Baudelaire, and above all, of Rimbaud, but the differences are just as striking and really more interesting. What makes him a specifically 20th century figure is his drastic will to break with the past, his attempt to programme for the new. The theatre and its double, for instance, for instance, is a systematic attempt to break with a tradition that has been shunted up a dead end and with the hegemony of literature over theatre; as if he is sealing off all routes of escape, not only for the reader, but in the first place for himself, so that there is nothing left but to take steps into the future. I want at the same time to correct a view of Artaud that sees The theatre and its double as the crown of his work and sees the rest of his life as a story of disaster, spiritual ship-wreck and incoherence. This is, I think, a new discussion in Holland, for the simple reason that Artaud's later work does not exist in Dutch translations. In Artaud's later work, approaching it, it is as if all the paths run out. It cannot simply be dealt with as literature, as poetry. It does not belong to any genre that we recognize. There is masses of it, notes, letters, litanies, diatribes. Moreover, you get the feeling that he intended it all to be taken at the same level, It is as if he was only capable, in view of the urgency of what he had to say, of providing the raw material of art. Let later generations work it up into more acceptable forms! His correspondence is as much a 'work of art' as a piece that states itself to be a poem. This work is full of inconsistencies - he includes the waverings of his thoughts as plans for a new theatre; on the other he gets in a rage when Breton describes him as a man of the theatre. These writings are deformed equally by indecisiveness and by dogmatism. They are continually punctuated by ritual outbursts in his invented rhythmic pre-Babel language. He provokes our sympathy (our generation raised on the progressive humanism of anti-psychiatry!) when he tells how whenever he uses the word 'envoûtement' (magic spells) the psychiatrist threatens him with electric shock. Then, the next moment he produces a running description of some of these spells, which provoke in us nothing but weariness and disbelief. It is as if we are locked up in a room with the madman. His outbursts of hatred and accusation often repel one with their sterility. What a waste! His negative attitude towards sexuality would seem to place him on the side of all the enemies of freedom; while his call for the, as it were, alchemical transformations of the human body as the source of the only possible revolution is above all why he had such an appeal for the generation of '68 and why he was seen at that time as a forerunner. One thing is striking in the midst of all this apparent confusion: he seemed to have no compunction about making all of his work public; he had none of the doubts about the value of what he had to say that afflict so many modern writers. And in the case of his radio play, he showed himself a fighter in contesting the banning of it. What is more, in madness or out of it, his production during the last four years of his life was enormous. Also, there is one note in it that is constant, despite all the contradictions: this is his commitment, not to literature, not to theatre, but to an engaged and reVolutionary transformation of life, spirit and perception. In view of the failure of the left political movement over the past decade, his constant statement that the real revolution lies deeper than the merely political, is a challenge. There is a world there, maybe, that we haven't begun to investigate.
In the end, his attitude forces one to choose either one is for him or against him. What I get firstly is a point about creative method. This refusal to distinguish between levels, between relevant and irrelevant, between fact and assumption, between trivial and sublime, this systematic lifting of the censorship of the mind is the hall-mark of the creative process of the modern artist. What I also get is a view of someone self-confessedly seeking a revolutionary path on the frontiers of art and life. It is this fact, so unobtrusive in a way, or so obvious as not to need stating, that makes Artaud an artist with whom I feel a profound kinship, no matter what difficulties I may have with some of the content of his work. The second point that has to be made about him here, as a preliminary to any understanding of his later work, is that his refusal to edit his writings (he didn't have time either!) was what enabled him to use the experience of his years in the asylums and to transcend the formal excellence of The theatre and its double (which owes its prominence partly at least to the fact that of all his writings it is the one that looks most like a completed book!). At the end of his life, then, Artaud was working away at the grounds for a new theatre, both in theory and in practice. His ideas were rather more experimental than those of The theatre and its double; moreover, they weren't just ideas: in Rodez and after, he had been testing his theories out physically, with chants and recitations and breathing exercises. He was putting himself on the line as an actor. 'The only thing I regret', he wrote in the preface to the new edition of The theatre and its double in 1945, 're-reading this book I wrote eight years ago, is in seeing that all the literary dynamism I possessed was not put to work for more exalted ideas'.7 Moreover there is a central thematic in all his work despite the variety of forms and modes he used to express it. What he is talking about - and considering who he was and what he had been through it is hardly surprising that this should be his theme - is a secular resurrection, a resurrection in this life and a radical transformation of the body. Here are a couple of short texts that state the theme concisely. The first is a letter to Paule Thévenin, the actress who worked with him on his radio play.
'I will never again have anything to do with the Radio.
I will from now on concentrate
exclusively on theatre
as I conceive of it,
a theatre of blood,
a theatre where every performance
will be made to win something
as much for the player as for the spectator,
what's more
it isn't playing, it is action (on ne joue pas, on agit).'8
The second piece is a little postscript to a poem on the Theatre of Cruelty. Both these pieces were written the month before he died and can be thought of as epitaphs of someone who made consciousness his principle.
'Who am I
where do I come from
I am Antonin Artaud
and I say it
as only I know how to
and you will see my real body
bursting into fragments
collected
under 10,000 notorious looks
as a new body
which you'll never be able to forget
for it's me
the Man
who will be judge
in the final reckoning
it's to me
that all the elements
of body and things
will come to be referred
it's the state of my
body will shape
the Last Judgement...'9
It is the story of Osiris, the body scattered through the land, lovingly gathered together by friends and admirers, the only possible resurrection. I had wanted in the last part of my talk to provide something of a survey of Artaud's later work, but I realize that the most I can do is to provide a few hints for reading him. Most importantly I keep on stumbling over the fact that this work simply isn't available in Dutch and before any commentary is really fair it will be necessary for Dutch translators to get to work! All I can do here, then, is to stress what this lacuna means in practice. In the first place I must say that to have a view of an Artaud whose centrepiece is The theatre and its double is to be able to fit Artaud into a certain modern scheme of things, to be able to discuss at least whether an Artaudian theatre is possible, and to use this phrase as a description of certain theatrical events. There is, then, a contemporary aesthetics of theatre that carries the word Artaudian as banner. This aesthetic is powerful in the sense that it has a stake in the existing culture. The fact that its products are often marked by a stiffness or pretentiousness or that they can so readily be claimed by a cultural élite goes largely unnoticed. Secondly, while Artaud did not go so far as to renounce The theatre and its double in his later work, he did state that he considered it unequal to what he wanted to say. Texts such as Theatre and science (quoted above) and Deranging the actor (12 May 1947) open onto another perspective which hasn't been touched by contemporary theatre directors.
'In effect theatre became the martyr of all who risked humanity, all who wanted
to shape the form of existence.
That was the state where one couldn't exist without consenting
in advance to be by definition and in essence
an absolute
lunatic.
Broken joints of limbs and splintered nerves,
fractures of bleeding bones which protest
ripped out of the skeleton of possibility - theatre is this inextricable and excitable
enchantment
which possesses revolt and war as inspiration
and cause...'10
The discussion that is initiated in these documents is not one that has been touched on by contemporary theatre directors, understandably maybe in view of his insistence on the necessity of including madness in the work. The truth is that it exists outside the bounds of what we consider culture. It is not a question of enlarging the frame of reference of what we consider art, or theatre, or culture. These texts come from the Other Shore, from that area of our society that is by definition excluded from culture. while at the same time being subjected to one of the most intensively rehabilitory operations of culture, the realm of the insane asylums. All of Artaud's later work has that air of a refusal to cooperate which is so typical of the inhabitants of mental hospitals, and which is really the only appropriate response to the coercive and ambivalent attitude that society has both towards its mad people and its artists. One could elaborate on the old adage 'there's method in his madness' by saying that with him it was an artistic method, a means of getting to say what could not be said otherwise. This is not to deny the reality of his condition or the fact of his suffering. The function of these texts, then, is by definition one of opposition to culture and to the accepted forms of culture. Their working-out is in principle disintegrative of these forms. These are not ideas that can simply be poured into a conceptual empty space. Like some new barbarian horde, they oppose themselves to both fullness and emptiness. Seen this way, the old discussion of whether or not there can be an Artaudian theatre or of whether Artaud's ideas of theatre can be realized in practice appears in a new light. The problem lies not with Artaud, but with the theatre. Moreover, it is not simply a problem of the stale of the theatre, whether it is good, bad or indifferent, but rather of the theatre as phenomenon and institution, one of the most crucial institutions of culture.
In place of a conclusion Paule Thévenin, the actress who collaborated with Artaud on his radio play, recently described him in an article that has the air of having been inspired by love and by a need to defend his memory, as an actor who broke down the barriers between life and art. Confronted wi th the impossibility of translating his ideas into the forms of theatre, he turned his life into theatre. wIt is a theatre, she writes, 'that dispenses with the stage, that no longer needs an audience assembled in a hall paying for their seats in order to have the right to be present at the spectacle, it is a theatre whose place is the body of the man who even offers up his life, whose public is the crowd that rubs shoulders with him and listens to his cries.'11 She is referring amongst other things to his spontaneous preaching to the crowd in Dublin (1937) who had gathered round this man in his state of high excitement. Criticism inspired by love is maybe the most inspiring, but love can make mistakes, principally because of the marvellous tendency of love to drive out objectivity. Her account, then, is attractive, but unwittingly it tends to make his madness picturesque. The logic of this kind of discourse ends in the acquiescing in the marginalization of so many artists who are unable to work either because of the hypersensitive development of their own characters or because of the commercialization of contemporary cultural institutions. Although her article was published last year, the mistake, or, rather, misplacement I feel she makes is one that is typical of the sixties. It consists of elevating the victim, out of an automatism of sympathy with his condition, to the status of hero, thereby avoiding confronting the problematic of a society that makes victims of its most outstanding spirits. I wasn't there but I do not think that the acts of Artaud's madness were acts of theatre. His genius and courage was rather to take this tragic flaw in himself and to use it as a source of creation. It must be stressed that while madness is behind his work, it is not the work itself. There is, however, some point in Paule Thévenin's account. Artaud's life does form a kind of tragic and exemplary myth and we should not underestimate this mythic status he has acquired and which, significantly, he also claimed for himself. Nor should we underestimate the implications of his career for us, struggling as we are in a culture increasingly alienated from the sources of life. The disturbances he set up continue long after his death. His work still requires its working-out. Or, to put it another way: if the artist's function is to hold up a mirror to society, we may have to accept the fact that in our time the mirrors are broken. Don't expect perfection. Truth is
1. Van Gogh, the man suicided by society, tr. Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights Artaud Anthology, p. 163, City Lights, San Francisco, 1965.
2. 'I suffer from a frightful disease of the mind. My thought abandons me at all stages. From the simple act of thinking to the external act of its materialization in words. Words, forms of phrases, inner directions of thinking, simple reactions of the mind - I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Hence, whenever I can seize upon a form, however imperfect it may be, I hold it fast, lest I lose the entire thought. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer, but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely.' Id., p.7. Letter to Jacques Rivière, 5.6.23.
3. Quoted by Bettina Knapp, Antonin Anaud, man of vision, p.198, Swallow Press, Ohio, 1980.
4. It must be said, however, that one of these Californian artists was Jack Hirschman, editor of the City Lights Artaud Anthology, and translator of many of the texts in this brilliant introduction to Artaud's work for English speaking readers.
5. The Theatre and its double, tr. Victor Corti, p.63, Calder and Boyars, London, 1970.
6. Artaud Anthology. Theatre and science, tr. Daniel Moore, p. 171.
7. My translation. Quoted by Paule Thévenin in Théatre en Europe, no.9, January l986.
8. My translation. Letter to Paule Thévenin, 24.2.46. Oeuvres complètes vol. l3, p.146.
9. Tr. Iack Hirschman. A second Artaud Anthology. Invisible City 6, July 1972, San Fransisco.
10. Deranging the actor, tr. Jack Hirschman. A second Artaud Anthology, id.
11. Théâtre en Europe, no.9. Quoted above. 'C'est un théâtre qui se passe des tréteaux, qui n'a nul besoin d'un public réuni dans une salle et payant sa place pour avoir le droit d'assister au spectacle, c'est un théâtre dont le lieu est le corps de l'homme proférant sa vie même, dont le public est la foule qui le côtoie et entend ses cris.'
Amsterdam, 20 augustus 1987
Antonin Artaud - Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu_P1
Antonin Artaud - Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu_P2
'The human face
is an empty power, a
field of death ...
... after countless thousands of years
that the human face has spoken
and breathed
one still has the impression
that it hasn't even begun to
say what it is and what it knows.'
Antonin Artaud, from a text to introduce an exhibition of his portraits and drawings, Galerie Pierre, July 1947.
i
It is difficult to say anything unique or original about Antonin Artaud who, after his death, first in the sixties and now again two decades later, has become such a celebrity that everyone seems obliged to have an opinion of him. That is why I found the intention of this series of talks attractive: the idea of one winter talking about another in the form of a more or less personal report inspired by admiration or love. And it remains attractive, although I must say that I don't think it can so easily be reduced to a case of me, Donald Gardner, actor and poet, talking about Antonin Artaud, also actor and poet, not to mention sufferer, path-breaker and reinventor of the human face, who died when I was 9, a time of my life when I had to endure deliriums and sleepwalkings in the cold dormitory of my English boarding school. From the school windows on a clear day you could see the French coast, so that I am tempted to fantasize that some vibrations of poor Artaud did cross the Channel and plant themselves in my forebrain the day he died. March 4, 1948 - of cancer of the rectum, an organ that figured centrally in his work. I can claim that, a couple of years later, also in bed in that same school, I heard the explosion of one of the first nuclear bombs on Bikini Atoll and that the windows shook from this event the other side of the world, a kind of experience, the verity of which I would however be at a loss to know how to prove, that was in some way similar to the one that Artaud described in his great text on Van Gogh, whose neck they or their fathers so well wrung when he was alive.
'Concerning Van Gogh. magic and spells, all the people who have paraded before the exhibition of his works at the Orangerie for the last two months are they really sure to remember all they did and everything that happened to them every night of the months of February, March, April and May 1956? Could there not have been one particular night when the atmosphere and the streets became liquid, gelatinous, unstable. and when the light of the stars and the celestial vault disappeared? And Van Gogh was not there, he who painted the Arles Café. But I was at Rodez, that is to say, still on earth, while all the inhabitants of Paris must have felt, all one night, very close to leaving it. And was this not because they had participated in unison in certain generalized dirty tricks, when the consciousness of Parisians left its normal level for an hour or two and proceeded to another one, one of those mass unfurlings of hatred dirty tricks, or two and proceeded to another one, one of those mass unfurlings of hatred which I have witnessed so many times during my nine years of internment. Now hatred is forgotten like the nocturnal expurgations that follow, and the same ones who so many times bared their swinish souls to the whole world now file past But was it not one of those evenings I have been talking about, that an enormous white stone fell on the Boulevard de la Madeleine at the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. as if shot from a recent volcanic eruption of the volcano Popocatepetl?'1
This kind of personal approach, however, too easily degenerates into sentimentality or an anecdotal mode, or even in the case of the great, despised dead into necrophilia. (Try seeing necrophilia from the point of view of the corpse!) Moreover Artaud himself, above all towards the end of his life, was only interested in hacking out the territory of the impersonal. Fallen star as he was, the magnetisms that fascinated him were not those of sentimental liaisons, but rather more universal attractions. Increasingly as his work matured you can see in it an almost scientific preoccupation with matters that are not normally considered reducible to this kind of investigation. Even his obsession with himself, so striking right from the beginning of his career, that he reveals in his correspondence with the critic and editor Jacques Rivière in which he tries to describe the deficiency of his thought process cannot be labelled as subjectivity or narcissism, but was rather prompted by a sense of the uniqueness and, at the same time, typicality of this fissure in consciousness.2 I should mention at this point that there is a continuity and development in Artaud's work right up to those magnificent, often fragmentary, last poems and texts that, if read in a certain spirit, can send shivers of recognition down one's spine . What makes him unique to my mind is his genius not just in wresting something from disaster but in actually turning it inside out and making of it the very substance of his work as though disaster and nothing less was a sort of touchstone for reality and truth in a work. It needs to be stressed that his work did not degenerate as a result of his clinical madness. Rather, like no other artist, he succeeded in incorporating madness into his work in a way that gave it a gestalt and coherence. In the end what we have of him is not so much a personality, however distinguished, but something like a tattered flag, blowing in the wind, unforgettable, marking off a certain territory of mind. In this sense, by the creation of a kind of impersonal spleandour in which life and work were inseparable, he may be said to have achieved what he set out to do and conquered even death. Or as the French director, Roger Blin, said of him so beautifully: 'I know Antonin Artaud only through his trajectory in me which is endless.'3 The problem, then, for an artist or writer who is influenced by Artaud is precisely that of stopping short of identification. The didactic and passionate nature of his thought would seem to draw the reader into it like a vortex. Yet Artaud's whole project was the recreation of himself as an inviolable individual: the restructuring of his own identity by way of a drastic confrontation with the void that terrified a and magnetized him at the same time. With his final insistence on the body as the bedrock of experience, Artaud might serve as an antidote to guru-ism. Typical of of our age, riddled through and through with anxiety as it is, where the motor power of the human imagination seems to pulse like a heart that sometimes misses a beat, is the tendency to form cults or follow leaders It is not surprising, then, that young artists have tended to fetishize or make a cult of Artaud and his work, above all of his madness. Anaïs Nin, in her diaries, was the first to draw attention to this; her criticism of the Californian beats was just that, that they loved his madness, rather than understanding him as an artist.4 I think myself that this fetishizing of his madness is precisely an avoidance of really looking at it, at the reality of it and its integral place in Artaud's works, born as they were out of an immensity of suffering, both mental and physical. The academic or university-based critic has the opposite problem. (For many recent writers, academic criticism itself presents a problem, as if the possibilities for a writer with all their variety and intricacy have been mapped out before s/he ever begins to put a word on paper. One of the major areas of freedom is in this way excluded for the modern writer: the field of artistic innocence. One is reminded of those children growing up in the city who have never seen a cow! Without this possibility of innocence it is questionable how any creative renewal can occur. But maybe that is precisely the point of academic criticism!) In any case, imagine you are such a critic and that you are sitting at your desk writing, and that you steal a glance in the mirror and see instead of your own familiar form that you have developed a hairy forearm like a baboon, and/or that instead of your much loved and trusty countenance you have the head of a gryphon or a cheetah! What then will you write? Things aren't always what they seem. What I am trying to find a way of saying is that the presumption of objectivity inherent in academic criticism is inadequate to dealing with a figure such as Artaud. Although his collected works have been published by Gallimard in, nota bene, 19 volumes thus guaranteeing him an honourable place in French literature, Artaud himself very clearly in text after text placed himself outside that bookish tradition. In his approach to language he gave the spoken word a crucial primacy over the written. His whole career, moreover, resists classification. How can he be described? As poet or as actor? As occultist or as polemicist against all forms of mysticism? As theatre director or as philosopher or as a theoretician of aesthetics? The concept of the objective point of view splinters when confronted with the protean variety of his work. With his syncretic energy, Artaud represents a new kind of cultural figure, a fact that explains why he continues to remain not only attractive but also profoundly disturbing decades after his death. This is finally what I want to make the subject of this paper. To explain just why Artaud was so fascinating for the generation of cultural explosion of the late sixties, and why I think he remains relevant and timely still, now nearly 20 years after the first publication of the City Lights Artaud Anthology, despite all attempts to tidy up after the movement of that time, and despite that other more subtle disclaimer that an his ideas have now been worked out in practice on the stages of the west and that he can now be safely confined once more to that category called history, a dead category in other words.
ii
I want to take a good look at this very common assumption of critics and others that have just mentioned, that Artaud's theoretical programme has now been so thoroughly put into practice on the stages of the west that we might as well all go back to our quiet homes in Hamsterdam, city of a diligent and industrious folk, where apparently 6% of job openings come in the sector called Art, and where, significantly, the profits that accrue go mainly to the Horeca industry, a fact that gives a new turn to the old truth that without food there can be no art. How marvellously we are screened here from war, famines and plagues. Every evening this sense of a blessed dispensation is confirmed in us by the sight on t.v. of these same calamities occurring somewhere else, a sight which paradoxically because it is so appalling feels distant enough from our reality to serve like nothing else to guarantee us a good night's rest. It really is true that we live here in the best of all possible worlds; and even though we do have the odd complaint or two, the chances are that they will only be minor ones, and that there will be agencies, subdivisions of the sociale dienst or the huisvesting, or buro's van rechtshulp, and so on, to enable us to redress them. That this recognition arouses in us no deep surge of feeling, no abnormal display of local patriotism if we happen to be a Hamsterdammer, no effusion of gratitude if we are one of those fortunate foreigners who have swum to enable us to redress them. That this recognition arouses in us no deep surge of feeling, no abnormal display of local patriotism if we happen to be a Hamsterdarmner, no effusion of gratitude if we are one of those fortunate foreigners who have swum to these shores, but at most only the thin smile of self-satisfaction, should hardly surprise us. The cat has got his cream and, what's more, he may drink it up without having to look over his shoulder in case another cat steals it from him. Of course egotism and greed continue to flourish in their socially accepted forms. Somehow a cat will glance anxiously round, just in case. And the smile turns out to be little more than a mask hiding who knows what depths and convulsions of anxiety. It is as though having succeeded in quarantining ourselves away from all wars and plagues, they somehow continue to exist in another more shadowy form, as buried mental states continually threatening to erupt. In this sense Artaud, who described himself as 'the man who has best charted his inmost self, his most imperceptible slitherings', may still be of interest to us. It goes without saying that there have been directors and actors who have been inspired by Artaud's work over the past 40 years. There were even a long time ago, in the sixties, one or two productions that questioned the accepted order of things in such a way to create a furore. I remember myself the Living Theatre's Frankenstein which really did have an Artaudian combination of wildness and rigour, while at the same time being so clearly the creation of the glint in Julian Beck's eye, bearing the imprint of his and Judith Malina's crusading passion. I think also of the production of the Constant Prince directed by Jerzy Grotowski that I saw in London, where the audience had to witness this spectacle of mysticism and sexual cruelty from narrow pew-like benches with a wooden board in front of them just high enough for us to lean our chins on, forcing us to the recognition that voyeurism is also an act of participation and that brothel and church are sister forms. It is, simply stated, impossible to imagine the modern theatre without Artaud. From the French directors of the fifties who knew him personally, down to Gerardjan Reijnders' elegant exposé of the forces of unreason, in the Carré Theatre in the Bacchanten, it is hard to think of a director of any stature who has not directly or obliquely been influenced by Artaud's ideas. Yet we have to admit that in this flurry of total theatre that our generation has witnessed something usually seems to be missing, and it is always, predictably, just that element that makes a work confrontational or truly disturbing. For one thing, Artaud's texts bristle with ideas, but they do not provide us with a method. There is no school of acting that derives from his name. Maybe it is even an evasion of the issue to discuss whether his influence on modern theatre has run its course: a concentration on symptoms instead of focusing on what our age actually demands. In a way, the discussion of influences is beside the point. What Artaud did was to introduce certain new criteria, not so much for aesthetic form, but, more disturbingly, for what a work of art is. All his work, not just The theatre and its double. but also the later texts and poems prowl round and round the whole question of artistic sincerity and of what truth is in a work. His struggle was with principles rather than with forms, and there are enough hints in his writings that suggest that he was seeking to go beyond the bounds of art. His criticism of the ballets russes, that splendid though the spectacle was, it remained within the bounds of art, this same criticism can be made of the theatre of Peter Brook or Gerardjan Reijnders. The visionary energy drains away in the domain where the work is presented, that of the cultural élite. The same can be said of the scale of this kind of work. Artaud was certainly not lacking in ambition, but his practical experience was always small-scale, in the experimental theatres of his time. 'One runs risks', he wrote, 'but I consider that in present-day conditions they are worth running. I do not believe we have succeeded in reanimating the world we live in and I also do not believe it worth hanging on to. But I propose something to get us out of the slump, instead of continuing to moan about it, about the boredom, dullness and stupidity of everything.'5 In practice, however, Artaud did not so much provide solutions as raise certain questions. Somehow it is this incompleteness, this lack-of-having-been-worked-out that means that his work still makes demands on us. Moreover his vision was of a work of such incandescence that the audience would, as it were, be alchemically transformed by it. Which of us has not asked that question and has realized how difficult it is to answer: which work of art has changed our lives? Not so much that the works that come to mind are incomplete or flawed but rather that at a certain crucial point they fail to deliver the decisive blows, or that they retreat into a merely formal excellence, or, to use a phrase of Cocteau's, they do not make the effort to know 'up to what point they could push further'. What, however, is striking is that this is a question that we have come to ask, and that in our age this is somewhere the demand that we have come to make of a work of art. Artaud's genius for me, and the reason why his influence is not yet played out, so that he transcends artistic and cultural fashions, consists in the courage with which he returned again and again to this thematic of the transformation of life. The theatre that claims to derive from Artaud has, by and large, stopped short of this extremism. It has rarely been motivated by this abrasive spirit of criticism which is basic energizing feature of all his work. As a result it has often done exactly what he denounced and concentrated only on the formal aspects of what now carries the jargon term 'total theatre'. Theatregoers will all be familiar with certain 'productions' where a fanfare of portentousness will be sounded every time the interest flags, in order to herald a supposedly deep metaphysical theme, that director and actors have sweated like demons to uncover. Artaud on the contrary, addressed himself to life first. It was in relation to the general collapse that he saw in social values and norms, that he called for a change in the theatre. He found the theatre around him backward. irrelevant and academic, out of touch with what was going on in society. In the equation life/theatre, life was for him the first term; but the chemical element, if you like, the catalyst for change, was to come from the theatre. This is what so clearly distinguishes him from his contemporaries who called for a political revolution. To quote from his text on Theatre and science, which is a late work, after his time in the asylums:
'And no political or moral revolution will be
possible
so long as man continues to be magnetically held down -
even in his most elementary and simple organic and nervous reactions -
by the sordid influence
of all the questionable centers of the Initiates,
who, sitting tight in the warmth of the electric blankets o
of their duality schism
laugh at revolutions as well as wars,
certain that the anatomic order on which the
existence as well as the duration of actual society is based
will no longer know how to be changed.'6
And yet what he was calling for was revolution, no more no less. And he saw theatre as the carrier par excellence of this revolution. There was a two-edged weapon. On the one hand it had the simple power to embody dreams. On the other, this power serves to provoke in the public a divine discontent and thus the very existence of theatre secretes a criticism of life as it is currently lived. In his view theatre could only work so to intensify people's longing that life as it is lived would be revealed as intolerable and the conditions would be ready for the generation of a new 'risen state of body'. Put this way, his vision may sound like the ravings of a naive innocent or, indeed, a madman. However, our inability to conceive of a work of art as being able possess such power may only be an indication of how deeply the process of alienation has worked itself into the body of our culture. If we compare his time with ours, the beleaguered but lively, quarrelsome avant-garde of the early thirties, existing in a context of conspicuous danger, a world dominated by slump and the rise of fascism, with ours, the mid-eighties, where the avant- garde h as become institutionalized, the domain of a specialized élite, a situation which finds its parallel in a kind of deep freeze in the social body, where cold war and the threat of total destruction numb our brains and cauterize the life of our feelings, making the idea of radical change almost unthinkable, we may begin to understand why the kernel of Artaud's thought has become so inaccessible. Even his fame seals him off from us. We may even conclude that his project belongs to the realm of beautiful utopias that cannot be fulfilled. We might abandon all dreams of greatness and content ourselves with 'dallying with forms'. Alternatively we might remind ourselves of the figure of the Viceroy of Cagliari, Saint Rémy's in Artaud's essay on The theatre and the plague, that magnetic, despotic, apparently arbitrary figure, who foresaw in a dream that the ship, the Grand Saint-Antoine, was infested with the plague and backed by the threat of cannon fire drove it away from the port of Cagliari. The captain is a thinly disguised double for Artaud - a characteristic expression of anarchism and despotism - and his hypersensitive sense of urgency was Artaud's own. We may find in ourselves a similar sense of urgency: the solutions we resort to will have to be our own.
iii
The field of culture is not a neutral zone. In every generation it is a terrain can be seen as one that must be contested, to be lost or won. Some of us sense it is not existence but consciousness that is at stake in our time - not so much the threat to human life from nuclear war, but that other danger masked by this crude threat, that of the submergence of consciousness - in other words, of living life, life infested with awareness of itself. This is the field of culture. It can also be thought of as an arena. In the world of culture there are reactionary movements as well as progressive ones, even though these terms are rather more delicate of application, and may even signify something fairly different from what they do in the political struggle. It must be said, however, that an attempt to revitalize certain dead cultural forms and the contentless mannerism of so much contemporary art has some relation with the tide of right-wing governments and with the economic squeeze. Because this tendency involves 'going with the tide' it does not have to provide much overt justification for itself. It is correspondingly difficult to pin down. The results in theatre cannot simply be listed on the fingers of a hand. For instance, there is a retreat behind the proscenium arch; and there is a certain fetishizing of the author, a propagating of the play script as independent phenomenon, but this isn't something that happens everywhere; the retreat is often more subtly masked: there can exist a proscenium arch in the brain, even when the outward form looks experimental. What often occurs is an obsession with expensive accessories, such as video monitors, or with theatre as an image-producing form, rather than one of movement, of confrontation, of agon. The question of acting is crucially avoided, or else focusing on technique or on a narrow concept of professionality is used as an alibi for side-stepping the whole discussion of what acting is in this time. Parallel to this is an uncoupling of theatre from life. Particularly strange and unnerving here (in Amsterdam) is the taking for granted of theatre as a given cultural form. You get the feeling of an attitude that there always has been a theatre and that there always will. A certain air of timelessness hangs over even the more experimental work done here: a vital dynamic is missing, a fact that can most clearly be seen in the absence of the sense of the need to seek new audiences. I do not mean to stray too far from Artaud. In the sense that Artaud was a visionary and utopian figure who himself very clearly intended to go beyond the bounds of art, it might be inappropriate to get bogged down in a discussion of contemporary theatre. However, the fact that his work is critical as well as utopian means that it is still possible to use it as a yardstick when we confront our own cultural reality. I always have the sense reading him that he is an ally or forerunner. In the last part of this talk I want to focus on the theme suggested by the title, 'the reinvention of the human face'. I want to stress that Artaud, while he was clearly no humanist, was very definitely a utopian artist. In other words, he wasn't interested in traditional human values, but with starting from scratch, starting all over. I want to emphasize this aspect of him, as against the picture that is usually given of him as the last of the poètes maudits'. It is true that he is in the lineage of Baudelaire, and above all, of Rimbaud, but the differences are just as striking and really more interesting. What makes him a specifically 20th century figure is his drastic will to break with the past, his attempt to programme for the new. The theatre and its double, for instance, for instance, is a systematic attempt to break with a tradition that has been shunted up a dead end and with the hegemony of literature over theatre; as if he is sealing off all routes of escape, not only for the reader, but in the first place for himself, so that there is nothing left but to take steps into the future. I want at the same time to correct a view of Artaud that sees The theatre and its double as the crown of his work and sees the rest of his life as a story of disaster, spiritual ship-wreck and incoherence. This is, I think, a new discussion in Holland, for the simple reason that Artaud's later work does not exist in Dutch translations. In Artaud's later work, approaching it, it is as if all the paths run out. It cannot simply be dealt with as literature, as poetry. It does not belong to any genre that we recognize. There is masses of it, notes, letters, litanies, diatribes. Moreover, you get the feeling that he intended it all to be taken at the same level, It is as if he was only capable, in view of the urgency of what he had to say, of providing the raw material of art. Let later generations work it up into more acceptable forms! His correspondence is as much a 'work of art' as a piece that states itself to be a poem. This work is full of inconsistencies - he includes the waverings of his thoughts as plans for a new theatre; on the other he gets in a rage when Breton describes him as a man of the theatre. These writings are deformed equally by indecisiveness and by dogmatism. They are continually punctuated by ritual outbursts in his invented rhythmic pre-Babel language. He provokes our sympathy (our generation raised on the progressive humanism of anti-psychiatry!) when he tells how whenever he uses the word 'envoûtement' (magic spells) the psychiatrist threatens him with electric shock. Then, the next moment he produces a running description of some of these spells, which provoke in us nothing but weariness and disbelief. It is as if we are locked up in a room with the madman. His outbursts of hatred and accusation often repel one with their sterility. What a waste! His negative attitude towards sexuality would seem to place him on the side of all the enemies of freedom; while his call for the, as it were, alchemical transformations of the human body as the source of the only possible revolution is above all why he had such an appeal for the generation of '68 and why he was seen at that time as a forerunner. One thing is striking in the midst of all this apparent confusion: he seemed to have no compunction about making all of his work public; he had none of the doubts about the value of what he had to say that afflict so many modern writers. And in the case of his radio play, he showed himself a fighter in contesting the banning of it. What is more, in madness or out of it, his production during the last four years of his life was enormous. Also, there is one note in it that is constant, despite all the contradictions: this is his commitment, not to literature, not to theatre, but to an engaged and reVolutionary transformation of life, spirit and perception. In view of the failure of the left political movement over the past decade, his constant statement that the real revolution lies deeper than the merely political, is a challenge. There is a world there, maybe, that we haven't begun to investigate.
In the end, his attitude forces one to choose either one is for him or against him. What I get firstly is a point about creative method. This refusal to distinguish between levels, between relevant and irrelevant, between fact and assumption, between trivial and sublime, this systematic lifting of the censorship of the mind is the hall-mark of the creative process of the modern artist. What I also get is a view of someone self-confessedly seeking a revolutionary path on the frontiers of art and life. It is this fact, so unobtrusive in a way, or so obvious as not to need stating, that makes Artaud an artist with whom I feel a profound kinship, no matter what difficulties I may have with some of the content of his work. The second point that has to be made about him here, as a preliminary to any understanding of his later work, is that his refusal to edit his writings (he didn't have time either!) was what enabled him to use the experience of his years in the asylums and to transcend the formal excellence of The theatre and its double (which owes its prominence partly at least to the fact that of all his writings it is the one that looks most like a completed book!). At the end of his life, then, Artaud was working away at the grounds for a new theatre, both in theory and in practice. His ideas were rather more experimental than those of The theatre and its double; moreover, they weren't just ideas: in Rodez and after, he had been testing his theories out physically, with chants and recitations and breathing exercises. He was putting himself on the line as an actor. 'The only thing I regret', he wrote in the preface to the new edition of The theatre and its double in 1945, 're-reading this book I wrote eight years ago, is in seeing that all the literary dynamism I possessed was not put to work for more exalted ideas'.7 Moreover there is a central thematic in all his work despite the variety of forms and modes he used to express it. What he is talking about - and considering who he was and what he had been through it is hardly surprising that this should be his theme - is a secular resurrection, a resurrection in this life and a radical transformation of the body. Here are a couple of short texts that state the theme concisely. The first is a letter to Paule Thévenin, the actress who worked with him on his radio play.
'I will never again have anything to do with the Radio.
I will from now on concentrate
exclusively on theatre
as I conceive of it,
a theatre of blood,
a theatre where every performance
will be made to win something
as much for the player as for the spectator,
what's more
it isn't playing, it is action (on ne joue pas, on agit).'8
The second piece is a little postscript to a poem on the Theatre of Cruelty. Both these pieces were written the month before he died and can be thought of as epitaphs of someone who made consciousness his principle.
'Who am I
where do I come from
I am Antonin Artaud
and I say it
as only I know how to
and you will see my real body
bursting into fragments
collected
under 10,000 notorious looks
as a new body
which you'll never be able to forget
for it's me
the Man
who will be judge
in the final reckoning
it's to me
that all the elements
of body and things
will come to be referred
it's the state of my
body will shape
the Last Judgement...'9
It is the story of Osiris, the body scattered through the land, lovingly gathered together by friends and admirers, the only possible resurrection. I had wanted in the last part of my talk to provide something of a survey of Artaud's later work, but I realize that the most I can do is to provide a few hints for reading him. Most importantly I keep on stumbling over the fact that this work simply isn't available in Dutch and before any commentary is really fair it will be necessary for Dutch translators to get to work! All I can do here, then, is to stress what this lacuna means in practice. In the first place I must say that to have a view of an Artaud whose centrepiece is The theatre and its double is to be able to fit Artaud into a certain modern scheme of things, to be able to discuss at least whether an Artaudian theatre is possible, and to use this phrase as a description of certain theatrical events. There is, then, a contemporary aesthetics of theatre that carries the word Artaudian as banner. This aesthetic is powerful in the sense that it has a stake in the existing culture. The fact that its products are often marked by a stiffness or pretentiousness or that they can so readily be claimed by a cultural élite goes largely unnoticed. Secondly, while Artaud did not go so far as to renounce The theatre and its double in his later work, he did state that he considered it unequal to what he wanted to say. Texts such as Theatre and science (quoted above) and Deranging the actor (12 May 1947) open onto another perspective which hasn't been touched by contemporary theatre directors.
'In effect theatre became the martyr of all who risked humanity, all who wanted
to shape the form of existence.
That was the state where one couldn't exist without consenting
in advance to be by definition and in essence
an absolute
lunatic.
Broken joints of limbs and splintered nerves,
fractures of bleeding bones which protest
ripped out of the skeleton of possibility - theatre is this inextricable and excitable
enchantment
which possesses revolt and war as inspiration
and cause...'10
The discussion that is initiated in these documents is not one that has been touched on by contemporary theatre directors, understandably maybe in view of his insistence on the necessity of including madness in the work. The truth is that it exists outside the bounds of what we consider culture. It is not a question of enlarging the frame of reference of what we consider art, or theatre, or culture. These texts come from the Other Shore, from that area of our society that is by definition excluded from culture. while at the same time being subjected to one of the most intensively rehabilitory operations of culture, the realm of the insane asylums. All of Artaud's later work has that air of a refusal to cooperate which is so typical of the inhabitants of mental hospitals, and which is really the only appropriate response to the coercive and ambivalent attitude that society has both towards its mad people and its artists. One could elaborate on the old adage 'there's method in his madness' by saying that with him it was an artistic method, a means of getting to say what could not be said otherwise. This is not to deny the reality of his condition or the fact of his suffering. The function of these texts, then, is by definition one of opposition to culture and to the accepted forms of culture. Their working-out is in principle disintegrative of these forms. These are not ideas that can simply be poured into a conceptual empty space. Like some new barbarian horde, they oppose themselves to both fullness and emptiness. Seen this way, the old discussion of whether or not there can be an Artaudian theatre or of whether Artaud's ideas of theatre can be realized in practice appears in a new light. The problem lies not with Artaud, but with the theatre. Moreover, it is not simply a problem of the stale of the theatre, whether it is good, bad or indifferent, but rather of the theatre as phenomenon and institution, one of the most crucial institutions of culture.
In place of a conclusion Paule Thévenin, the actress who collaborated with Artaud on his radio play, recently described him in an article that has the air of having been inspired by love and by a need to defend his memory, as an actor who broke down the barriers between life and art. Confronted wi th the impossibility of translating his ideas into the forms of theatre, he turned his life into theatre. wIt is a theatre, she writes, 'that dispenses with the stage, that no longer needs an audience assembled in a hall paying for their seats in order to have the right to be present at the spectacle, it is a theatre whose place is the body of the man who even offers up his life, whose public is the crowd that rubs shoulders with him and listens to his cries.'11 She is referring amongst other things to his spontaneous preaching to the crowd in Dublin (1937) who had gathered round this man in his state of high excitement. Criticism inspired by love is maybe the most inspiring, but love can make mistakes, principally because of the marvellous tendency of love to drive out objectivity. Her account, then, is attractive, but unwittingly it tends to make his madness picturesque. The logic of this kind of discourse ends in the acquiescing in the marginalization of so many artists who are unable to work either because of the hypersensitive development of their own characters or because of the commercialization of contemporary cultural institutions. Although her article was published last year, the mistake, or, rather, misplacement I feel she makes is one that is typical of the sixties. It consists of elevating the victim, out of an automatism of sympathy with his condition, to the status of hero, thereby avoiding confronting the problematic of a society that makes victims of its most outstanding spirits. I wasn't there but I do not think that the acts of Artaud's madness were acts of theatre. His genius and courage was rather to take this tragic flaw in himself and to use it as a source of creation. It must be stressed that while madness is behind his work, it is not the work itself. There is, however, some point in Paule Thévenin's account. Artaud's life does form a kind of tragic and exemplary myth and we should not underestimate this mythic status he has acquired and which, significantly, he also claimed for himself. Nor should we underestimate the implications of his career for us, struggling as we are in a culture increasingly alienated from the sources of life. The disturbances he set up continue long after his death. His work still requires its working-out. Or, to put it another way: if the artist's function is to hold up a mirror to society, we may have to accept the fact that in our time the mirrors are broken. Don't expect perfection. Truth is
1. Van Gogh, the man suicided by society, tr. Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights Artaud Anthology, p. 163, City Lights, San Francisco, 1965.
2. 'I suffer from a frightful disease of the mind. My thought abandons me at all stages. From the simple act of thinking to the external act of its materialization in words. Words, forms of phrases, inner directions of thinking, simple reactions of the mind - I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Hence, whenever I can seize upon a form, however imperfect it may be, I hold it fast, lest I lose the entire thought. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer, but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely.' Id., p.7. Letter to Jacques Rivière, 5.6.23.
3. Quoted by Bettina Knapp, Antonin Anaud, man of vision, p.198, Swallow Press, Ohio, 1980.
4. It must be said, however, that one of these Californian artists was Jack Hirschman, editor of the City Lights Artaud Anthology, and translator of many of the texts in this brilliant introduction to Artaud's work for English speaking readers.
5. The Theatre and its double, tr. Victor Corti, p.63, Calder and Boyars, London, 1970.
6. Artaud Anthology. Theatre and science, tr. Daniel Moore, p. 171.
7. My translation. Quoted by Paule Thévenin in Théatre en Europe, no.9, January l986.
8. My translation. Letter to Paule Thévenin, 24.2.46. Oeuvres complètes vol. l3, p.146.
9. Tr. Iack Hirschman. A second Artaud Anthology. Invisible City 6, July 1972, San Fransisco.
10. Deranging the actor, tr. Jack Hirschman. A second Artaud Anthology, id.
11. Théâtre en Europe, no.9. Quoted above. 'C'est un théâtre qui se passe des tréteaux, qui n'a nul besoin d'un public réuni dans une salle et payant sa place pour avoir le droit d'assister au spectacle, c'est un théâtre dont le lieu est le corps de l'homme proférant sa vie même, dont le public est la foule qui le côtoie et entend ses cris.'
Amsterdam, 20 augustus 1987
Antonin Artaud - Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu_P1
Antonin Artaud - Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu_P2
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