Longer Views (7 page)

32
. Susan Sontag, “Introduction,” from
A Barthes Reader
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), p. ix. (Hereafter referred to as BR.)

Longer Views

For Cynthia Belgrave

and Ethyl Eichelberger

What follows is a work of popular cultural history, not of original research. It required not one foray into any other library save my own. Here is its only justification:

This scholar is often chary of quoting the first-hand sources of that one, tending to summarize rather than repeat. It waits, then, for a work of assemblage such as this to retell the social tale with the immediacy and richness of shared original accounts through judicious quotation. To make points, I have put together what struck me as the most exciting parts of the stories around Artaud's final year at Ivry (and his earlier encounter with Jacques Rivière of
La Nouvelle Revue Francaise
) and of Wagner's participation in the Dresden Uprising of 1849. Lest some scholar chide me for ignorance or willful distortion, I state here that in neither case have I told the whole story; there are many facts that are known about both that do not fit into the neat and headlong narratives I have constructed. A reader would never know, from this account (for example), that the composer's young niece, Johanna Wagner, was a singer in Wagner's company in Dresden, who, since premiering Elizabeth in Wagner's
Tannhäuser
in October 1845 at age nineteen, was coming to rival Schröder-Devrient in popularity, and that from time to time throughout the fighting Wagner was concerned for her safety; nor will the reader find any mention of some of Artaud's more tempestuous relations with any number of fascinating figures of '30s and '40s Paris (such as his brief, intense pursuit of Anaïs Nin) that laid another layer of legend over an already legendary man. This work is selective, then, not exhaustive. I urge anyone intrigued by it to pursue the stories into
the realm of detail (my briefest of bibliographies will only be a beginning) where narrative neatness crumbles and—very possibly—knowledge, with its real limitations, begins.

Were two men more alike in their designs on an audience, in their desire to thrust theater, even art itself, to the horizon of its time, then shatter that horizon, to call up new images, sounds, emotions at the behest of spectacle? There is at least one level where—cruel, after all (Artaud explains to us in
The Theater and Its Double
), not because of its violence or its pain but because of its rigor, its demand for committed audience attention, for complete artistic dedication—Artaud's Theater of Cruelty
is
the performance site for Wagner's Total Artwork, the
Gesamtkunstwerk
.

Here is a passage from the opening page of a biography of one of them:

[He] was both a visionary and a mystic. He saw the theater as had the people of antiquity, a ritual able to give rise to a numinous or religious experience within the spectator. To achieve such experience theatrically, he expanded the spectator's reality by arousing the explosive and creative forces with man's unconscious in determining man's actions. By means of a theater based on
myths, symbols
, and
gestures
, the [work] . . . became a weapon to be used to whip up man's irrational forces, so that a collective theatrical event could be turned into a personal living experience.

This is Bettina L. Knapp writing about Antonin Artaud. But anyone who knows of Wagner's articulate study of German mythology, from the Eddas and the
Volsungasaga
to the German legal records edited by Grimm, of his fascination with classical Greek theater or his desire to make his “music-dramas”—the term he devised to replace “opera”—strike effects of the most basic and profound emotional sort in his hearers, akin to moments of religious ecstasy, must pause a moment to be sure which man is being talked of. It would take almost no revision to make it a perfectly accurate description of Richard Wagner.

Were two men more dissimilar in the material reality of their artistic productions, in the immediate effect of that art on the world?

In February 1883, at Venice, in his apartments at the sumptuous Palazzo Vendramin, with an international entourage in attendance and an even greater audience in awe of him, favored by a king who had funded for him a temple at Bayreuth to the art of his own creation—yes,
the “music-drama”—Wagner died in his wife's arms at age sixty- nine, of diverticular gastric complications and a ruptured heart vessel. His last words were “My watch!” It had fallen from his pocket as Cosima tried to comfort him in the terminal agony that had seized him at his work desk.

Behind him were ten major and three minor operas, a youthful symphony, various preludes and much occasional music, as well as volumes of literary and theoretical works—
Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future
, the notorious anti-Semitic article “Jewry in Music,” and
Opera and Drama
—as well as volumes of autobiography, music reviews, essays on the organization of orchestras, music schools, and opera companies, historical speculations, political essays and pamphlets, poems, plays, and stories, as well as the thousands on thousands of letters sent throughout his life.

Artaud's death?

On the chill morning of March 4th, 1948, an old man at 52, all but toothless and emaciated as only a lifetime opium addict can be, his body eaten out by rectal cancer, his bloodstream thick with the chloral that he'd used to dampen the pain once the opium and morphine had ceased to have any effect, in a room in the small eighteenth-century pavilion without heating or water at the Ivry-sur-Seine clinic on the outskirts of Paris, seated at the foot of his bed not far from a fireplace filled with the ashes from the previous day against winter's ending cold, Artaud was found dead by the gardener who was, as he had been doing for some months now, bringing Artaud his breakfast. Ivry had been Artaud's home for two years since his release from his most recent confinement at the Rodez Asylum. The walls of his room, in which the mad poet Gérard de Nerval had once been confined, were covered with Artaud's drawings. A stout wooden block, which sometimes served as a table, and which a few months before Dr. Delmas had put in his room, telling him to hammer or stab it with a knife in order to take out his hostile feelings, was chopped nearly to bits. But almost a third of Artaud's life had been passed in one mental hospital or another.

Thirteen months prior to his death, Artaud may have had his best hours.
The Theater and Its Double
(1938)—Artaud's finest book and his greatest claim to our attention—had been reprinted in 1944. His essays from the '30s on the Tarahumara Indians had been gathered into a book,
A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara
(republished in the U.S. as
The Peyote Dance
), at the end of 1945. The previous spring, the five long letters he had written to Henri Parisot about his drug addiction, language, poetry, and art,
Letters from Rodez
(1946), had appeared. And in June, after nine years, he had been released from Rodez and had
moved into the comparatively benign Ivry-sur-Seine clinic, where he shortly was allowed to take up residence in the pavilion at the edge of the property, apart from the main building. Artaud had been released on condition that his livelihood would be taken care of; and a group of leading painters—among them Picasso, Braque, Arp, Léger, Duchamp, and Giacometti—had donated paintings for a benefit to raise the money; Gide, Sartre, René Char, Tristan Tzara, and more had given manuscripts and autographs that were also sold; and France's theater community staged another benefit on Artaud's behalf at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, at which various writers delivered appreciations of Artaud, Artaud's works were read, and where Jean-Louis Barrault took part in a forty-minute reading from
The Cenci
, Artaud's single full- length play—while Artaud himself waited, nervously, happily, in a cafe with a friend a few streets away. Interest in the haggard but brilliant man was, at this point, higher than ever before.

Artaud wanted to give a public reading of his new works—for since his release he was writing incessantly. A reading was arranged at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier for January 13, 1947, as part of a series of poetry readings billed as
Têteà-Têtes
. The rush on tickets was astonishing—most of them bought just before curtain time, as though the rumor of Artaud's talk had just gone around in the last hours. There were a hundred standees in the five-hundred-seat theater. The audience waiting for the curtain to open at nine included Gide, Breton, Arthur Adamov, and Albert Camus, as well as Artaud's close friends Roger Blin and Jean Paulhan—along with a host of actors, producers, directors, journalists, and students.

Shabby, dishevelled, like a zombie with overlong hair, Artaud walked on stage. He began to read from his work. He read from his recent poem “The Return of Artaud, le Mômo” (mômo is Marseillaise slang for fool; Araud had been born in Marseille):

. . .o kaya

o kaya pontoura

o pontoura

a pena poni

. . .

Not the membrane of the vault,

not the omitted member of this fuck,

born of devastation,

but meat gone bad,

beyond membrane,

beyond where it's hard or soft.

. . .

And if you don't understand the image,

—and this is what I hear you say

in a circle,

that you don't understand the image

which is at the bottom

of my cunt's hole,—

it's because you don't know the bottom,

not of things,

but of my cunt

mine,

although from the bottom of time

you all plashed there in a circle

the way one slanders a madman,

plots to death an incarceration

ge re ghi

regheghi

geghena

e reghena

a gegha riri. . .

He read from another poem that night, “Centre-Mére et Patron- Minet” (“Center-Mother and Boss-Puss”):

. . . cunta-mite and boss-puss

are the shit vocables

that father and mother

invented

in order to enjoy him to the utmost.

Who is that, him?

Strangled totem
.

like a member in a pocket

that life
frockets

from so close,

that the walled-in totem will finally

burst the belly to be born . . .

And from still another, “La Culture Indienne”:

. . . Caffre of urine from the slope of a hard vagina,

which resists when one takes it.

Urinary camphor from the mound of a dead vagina,

which slaps you when you stretch it. . .

Which two, and which of the two?

Who, both?

in the time

seventy times accursed

when man

crossing himself

was born son

of his sodomy

on his own ass

grown hard.

Why two of them,

and why born of
TWO?
. . .

If the poems were opaque, the night's performance must have been stunning—in both good and bad ways: Soon, Artaud dropped his prepared papers on the stage and began to extemporize on his treatment by psychiatrists at Rodez, where he had almost died of malnutrition, and on the terrors of the shock treatments he had endured there. By midnight, when he had gone on for more than two hours, finally not to conclude but rather to flee the stage in a state of emotional distress—it was finally over!—the audience was devastated. Here are two many-times-reprinted responses by men who attended that night's “lecture.” The first is from the journalist Maurice Saillet on the first prepared hour of the performance:

. . . when his impetuous hands fluttered like a pair of birds around his face; when his raucous voice, broken by sobs and stumbling tragically, began to declaim his splendid—but practically inaudible—poems, it was as if we were drawn into a danger zone, sucked up by that black sun, consumed by the “overall combustion” of a body that was itself a victim of the flames of the spirit.

About the latter impromptu part of the night, we have a letter from André Gide, who felt that Artaud's exit was among the most moving moments of his life:

Artaud's lecture was more extraordinary than one could have supposed: it's
something which has never been heard before, never seen, and which one will never again see. My memory of it is indelible—atrocious, painful, almost sublime at moments, revolting also, and quasi-intolerable.

To get some insight into Artaud's raillery against psychiatrists, note that, in the same month as his “lecture,” one day he left Ivry to see the van Gogh (1853-1890) exhibit at the Orangerie. Returning from the exhibit, Artaud visited his art dealer friend Pierre Loeb (who had arranged the benefit sale of paintings for Artaud's welfare), excited and exalted by the paintings he'd just seen.

“Why couldn't you write a book on van Gogh?” Loeb suggested, against the rush of Artaud's enthusiasm—at which point Artaud marched upstairs to the first floor of Loeb's house, sat down, and began to write—rapidly, nervously—his impressions.

Following up his eccentric friend's interest in the exhibition, a few days later Loeb sent Artaud a letter and some newspaper clippings about the exhibit. One of the articles, written by a psychiatrist, referred to van Gogh as a “degenerate of the Magnon type.” Artaud was incensed. Over five or six more days, along with the written impressions of that first afternoon, he produced an impassioned panegyric (and one of his most influential essays), “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society” (1947).