Longer Views (11 page)

Artaud was born at Marseille in 1896, into a close family, part French but mostly Levantine Greek. He was a brilliant, energetic, and—from certain angles—demonically good-looking young man. But an attack of meningitis, when he was seven or eight, may have been the physical origin of the mental problems that were to plague him throughout his life. Five years after starting a literary review at the Collège du Sacré Coeur and publishing his first poems in 1910, Artaud had his first breakdown and in his nineteenth year entered the first of the several mental asylums in which he would spend his early twenties. Between bouts of confinement, he spent nine months in the military, but was released on medical grounds. By twenty-four he'd begun to take laudanum. Still, by twenty-five, he had left the asylums to establish himself as an actor, both in plays and in films.

Artaud was talented, intelligent, good-looking, and luck broke in his favor on several occasions. While he never became an overwhelmingly popular public acting success, still his early theatrical years—now with Lugné Poe, now with Cocteau—were the stuff of legend. And he was also, now, writing and publishing poems and articles in various periodicals. Toward the end of April 1923, Artaud sent a small group of poems to Rivière at the
NRF
.

On May 1st, Rivière rejected them. “But,” Rivière wrote, generously and encouragingly, in his rejection note, “I am interested enough in them to want to make the acquaintance of their author. If it were possible for you to stop by the review some Friday between four and six, I would be happy to see you.” A month later, on June 5th, Artaud dropped in for a late Friday afternoon visit and chat. That same evening, Artaud composed a letter to Rivière, asking him to reconsider his rejection of the poems. His reasoning was most unusual.

“You must believe, sir, that I have in mind no immediate or selfish goal; I wish only to settle a desperate problem.” The problem that Artaud spelled out is the one with which we began this section. But that more articulate expression of it that we've already quoted is from later on in the correspondence. Here is Artaud's first elaboration of it from his first letter to Rivière:

I suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind. My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words. Words, shapes of sentences, internal directions of thought, simple reactions of the mind—I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus as soon as
I can grasp a form
, however imperfect, I pin it down, for a fear of losing the whole thought. I lower myself, I know, and I suffer from it, but I consent to it for fear of dying altogether. . . .

This is why, out of respect for the central feeling which dictates my poems to me and for those strong images or figures of speech which I have been able to find, in spite of everything I propose these poems for existence [i.e., that Rivière reconsider taking them for the
NRF]
. These figures of speech, these awkward expressions for which you reproach me, I have noticed and accepted. Remember: I did not contest them. They stem from the profound uncertainty of my thought. . . .

In showing you the poems, it seemed to me that their faults, their un- evennesses were not sufficiently flagrant to destroy the overall impression of each poem. . . .

I cannot hope that time or effort will remedy these obscurities or these failings. . . . And the question I would like to have answered is this: Do you think that one can allow less literary authenticity and effectiveness to a
poem which is imperfect but filled with powerful and beautiful things than to a poem which is perfect but without much internal reverberation? . . . The question for me is nothing less than knowing whether or not I have the right to continue to think, in verse or in prose.

Artaud concluded with a promise to drop by on another Friday and bring Rivière the two small booklets of poems of his that had just been published,
Trie Trac du Ciel
and
Douze Chansons
.

Rivière's answer—a reconfirmation of the rejection—was still generous in tone: But “. . . what prevents me for the moment from publishing any of your poems in
La Nouvelle Revue Française
[is that] . . . you do not usually succeed in creating a sufficient unity of impression.”

This “unity of impression” has been, of course, the smokescreen against just this problem at least since Poe pulled the phrase “unity of effect” out of Aristotle's classical constraints on tragedy and put it into his review of Hawthorne's
Twice-Told Tales
, in 1842. We are directly within that critical system for which flawed transitions are the privileged error.

Seven months passed.

The correspondence did not resume until the last days of January, 1924. In a new and sudden letter, Artaud confesses that he'd resented Rivière's last answer. Artaud more or less says: I came to you as a mental case looking for sympathy. You answered with a literary judgement on “some poems which I did not value, which I could not value. I flattered myself that you had not understood me.” But, he goes on, “I see today that I may not have been sufficiently explicit, and for this too I ask your forgiveness.” He then proceeds “to finish that confession” which he had begun about his “distressing state of mind.”

He explains to Rivière:

This scattered quality of my poems, these defects of form, the constant sagging of my thought, must be attributed not to a lack of practice, a lack of control of the instrument I was handling, a lack of
intellectual development
, but to a central collapse of the soul, to a kind of erosion, both essential and fleeting, of the thought, to a temporary non-possession of the material benefits of my development, to an abnormal separation of the benefits of thought (the impulse to think, at each of the terminal stratifications of thought, passing through all the stages, all the bifurcations of thought and of form). . ..

I only want to say enough about it to be at last understood and believed by you.

Artaud concludes by telling Rivière he is sending along “the latest product of my mind,” i.e., another poem.

The poem in question, “
Cri
” (“Cry”), is in quatrains that link a series of surreal images, in which skies collide, a stable boy is ordered to guard wolves instead of horses, stars eat, slugs walk, angels return, and the sea boils. It begins and ends with “the little celestial poet,” who opens the shutters of his heart, and, at the end of it all, “Leaves his celestial place / With an idea from beyond the earth / Pressed to his long-haired heart.” There is an asterisk, then; and the terminal quatrain reads:

Two traditions met.

But our padlocked thoughts

Did not have room:

Experiment to be repeated.

It would be very hard, I suspect, for anyone to take “
Cri
” other than as a self-conscious embodiment of just the “awkwardnesses,” “oddities,” and “divergent images” Rivière had chided Artaud for in his response to the first submission. As such, there is something disconcerting and rather undergraduate about this second. It's certainly not a poem that the editor of the
NRF
would be likely to have published in 1924—if only because of its fairly clear intention to ridicule, however ironically and by example, Rivière's well-meant—and well-put—criticism.

Rivière did not get around to answering this one. I think it's understandable why. He had rejected Artaud's poems. And because he had presented himself as accessible and open on a personal level, he was being badgered to change his mind and take them anyway. There is one level where Artaud's argument, no matter how intriguing, parallels one that anybody who has ever taught creative writing has gotten at least once from the belligerent student who has had his (it is almost always a he) work criticized and is unhappy about it: “What you call my mistakes aren't that at all. They're exactly what I intended to do. The uncomfortable and awkward effects they produce
were
what I wanted. They document how I was feeling about it all when I wrote it. You just didn't understand that. But now that you do, don't you think it's better than you did?”

Indeed, the only thing that separates Artaud's argument from that of the wounded student defending his run-on and fragmentary sentences, protesting that his misplaced modifiers, clichés, and wrongly used words are exactly what he meant to write, is the language Artaud uses to detail his position, the energy with which he expresses his ideas, and the general insight, acuity, and level of abstraction at which he pitches his argument. Artaud was canny enough not to say that he placed flaws in his
work intentionally. Rather, he argues, because of his mental condition, he could not avoid flaws. Nevertheless, once they'd been committed, he recognized them as signs—documents—of that condition, and decided—intentionally and for aesthetic reasons—to let them stand because that's what they were.

The problem that Artaud brings us to the edge of (and that the contemporary philosopher Derrida pulls out of Artaud's arguments in two brilliant essays on the French poet and dramaturge) is whether or not we ever really think—and, by extension, whether or not we ever really create—
anything
“intentionally.” We create things that bear signs of order or disorder. We say, “I'm going to write a novel or a poem about X,” and then we go on to write a novel or a poem that may turn out to be about X or about something entirely other. Or we may not write anything at all. As the language centers of the brain offer up words to put down on paper, we decide to accept those words, or we decide to reject them and wait for others with which to replace them. But in terms of the offering-up itself, does intention
really
have anything to do with it? The blocked writer can
intend
to write until the cows come home; but he or she sits before the blank page and the wells yield no language.

Isn't writing, finally, a responsive and non-understood process as opaque in its workings as life itself, which consciousness only oversees, overhears, and which the fiction of intention only tries to tame?

Perhaps intention is an empty philosophical category to mask this profound split in the consciousness of all speaking and writing subjects, a split where language never really cleaves to intention but is always in excess of it, or escapes it entirely, or contravenes it openly, or even fails to come near it.

Perhaps it is just this split that poets from Dante Alighieri to Yeats and Jack Spicer (not omitting Artaud) have dealt with by talking of their work as given to them, as dictated to them, as originating somewhere on the other side of a profound gap in the self, where intention has no sway.

And what happens to art if that is, indeed, the case?

But if Artaud's psychological analysis is more precise—or even more honest—than that of the protesting student writer, the underlying emotional belligerence and the immaturity that propel them both are all too clearly the same. The most generous interpretation we can put on that aspect of Artaud's argument is that this emotional morass may just
be
the “collapse of the soul” Artaud is writing of. Nevertheless that aspect was probably what made Artaud's argument, no matter how astute, difficult to respond to.

A week shy of two months later, when he had still received no answer, Artaud sent a brief, curt note to Rivière:

My letter deserved at least a reply. Return, sir, my letters and manuscripts.

I would like to have found something intelligent to say to you to indicate clearly what divides us, but it is useless. I am a mind not yet formed, an idiot: think of me what you will.

It was hectoring. It was belligerent. It was disingenuously self-pitying (“. . . a mind not yet formed, an idiot. . .” indeed!). But three days later, on March 25th, Rivière returned an answer. In spite of everything, he had come to appreciate just those qualities of energy, acuity, and living language in Artaud's letters. He wrote, “One thing strikes me: the contrast between the extraordinary precision of your self-diagnosis and the vagueness, or at least the formlessness, of your creative efforts.” Rivière went on, in his longest letter to date, to try to discuss Artaud's problem at the same level of analysis that Artaud had.

I do not think Rivière's analytical passages strike most readers today as very strong.

Thus it is even more to his credit that he could recognize (in the face of all Artaud's emotional theatrics so transparently trying to mask simple, badgering rudeness) an impassioned and subtle analytical writer when Rivière could not offer an analysis of his own to equal it. Still, Rivière's letter broached at least one important idea that Freud had put forth twenty-five years before, which seems germane:

You speak somewhere in your letter of the “fragility of the mind.” This fragility is superabundantly borne out by the mental disorders studied and catalogued by psychiatry. But it has not, perhaps, been sufficiently shown to what degree so-called normal thought is the product of chance mechanisms.

The suggestion here is, of course, that abnormal thought processes may provide insight into normal thinking. If you want to learn about the psychological mechanics of falling asleep, do you ask the exhausted quarryman whose eyes seal nightly within the minute his head hits the pillow—or do you ask the insomniac who has examined in anxious anticipation every instant of the painfully protracted process of dozing off? If you are seeking an anatomy of the creative impulse, do you ask the titanic artist who belches forth a rich and sumptuous novel in a week or six—or do you ask the hesitant, all-but-blocked poet, for whom each word is a travail and a gamble with an endless, obliterating silence? If you want to know the workings of the normal mind, do you ask the
clearly, the smugly, the certainly and safely sane—or do you turn to those for whom “normal behavior” is only a fleetingly-arrived-at state, unretainable despite all effort, a state that tears itself to pieces between passages of derangement?