By Steve Finbow.
Antonin Artaud, A Sinister Assassin: Last Writings, Ivry-sur-Seine, September 1947 to March 1948 (Infinity Land Press, 2022). Edited, translated and with an introduction by Stephen Barber.
Martin Amis — that long-forgotten satirist of Britain’s long-forgotten ethics and morals (and whose name one does not expect to encounter in an essay on Antonin Artaud) — wrote in the opening note to London Fields that “there are two kinds of titles — two grades, two orders. The first kind of title decides on a name for something that is already there. The second kind of title is present all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page.” Originally, I planned to call this piece, “Fuck Off, Roland Barthes, And, While We’re At It. You Can Sling Your Hook An’ All, Michel Foucault.” But thinking that too drily academic, I decided on the second kind of title, “Letters to an other,” as an implicit naming of Artaud’s new revelations of being.
Rather like those people on buses talking on their phones in a non-stop monologue, making you question if there is an interlocutor on the end of the line or just an empty room lined with mirrors and an echo chamber, Artaud wrote thousands of letters — to Jean Paulhan, to André Breton, to Jean Dubuffet, to Arthur Adamov, to Georges Braque, to Anne Manson, to Colette Thomas, and many others — but always to his self. In an early letter to Jacques Rivière, Artaud confessed, “There is something which destroys my thought; something which does not prevent me from being what I might be, but which leaves me, so to speak, in suspension. Something furtive which robs me of the words that I have found, which reduces my mental tension, which is gradually destroying in its substance the body of my thought, which is even robbing me of the memory of those idioms with which one expresses oneself and which translate accurately the most inseparable, the most localized, the most living inflections of thought”. To which Rivière responded, “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”. And Rivière published their correspondence in the Nouvelle Revue Française rather than the poems Artaud had submitted.
These fragments and letters are epistolary grenades, fragments of finitude, auto-autopsies, in which Artaud’s pen — filled with ink or blood or shit — became a scalpel with which he incised (inscribed) himself, forcepping his memories, retracting his theories, scissoring his fears in the reflection of the page; so much so that his auto-consumption resembled Michel Lotito’s ingestion of bicycles, televisions and even a Cessna 150 airplane — after all, there is nothing more indigestible than the self. Barthes wrote that, “We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. But can we really read Artaud without thinking of Artaud, an artist — like his beloved Vincent van Gogh — ignored, smothered and destroyed by society? A writer who exists unaware of readers, whose auto-cannibalism (literally not textually) creates the myth of Artaud the writer. If the reader is Thyestes, thief of the Golden Fleece of “meaning,” and Artaud is Atreus, then the two heads under the silver platter at the reconciliation dinner are those of Barthes and Foucault. The House of Artaud — Friedrich Hölderlin, Gérard de Nerval, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Michaux and Pierre Guyotat — are authors/artists ever present in and impossible to remove from their work.
As Stephen Barber explains in his introduction, “This book assembles Artaud’s crucial work from September 1947 to March 1948, when that work was concentrated spatially into its location at his pavilion in the grounds of a convalescence clinic in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the southern edge of Paris — and especially on the insurgent, fragmentary work of the final weeks of his life”. And that combined image of spatial location and fragmentary insurgence succinctly summarises the detonation of denotation in Artaud’s work – the subjectile and the projectile. The introduction provides fascinating insights into Artaud’s final years — his madness, illnesses, drug addiction, penury and genius. Barber is always particularly good at topographical correspondences and illuminates Artaud’s connection and disconnection with the artistic world of Paris and his treatment in a dilapidated clinic at the end of a Métro line. And when we think of Artaud’s work, we tend to think of places — of Marseille, Paris, Bali, Mexico, Ireland, Rodez — and Barber has firmly situated Ivry-sur-Seine as a topos of Artaud’s demise and passing: another geodesic sphincter between and linking sanity and madness, art and writing, life and death.
If nothing else, Artaud’s work is a complete revaluation of all things human. He asks…
from myself
to myself
who is it that comes
and who is it that goes?
That precise moment during illness when one becomes embodied completely in suffering and yet disembodied and staring down at that body, no longer the self but some other, where the only question is the question of identity and wholeness, where the unitary self realises that it contains multitudes in dizzying perpetual interchanges of emotions and instincts. Few writers / artists were / are as brave as Artaud in examining his self and his self as an other.
All of us are enveloped by a secondary humanity
a humanity that is malevolent and sinister
Artaud confronts the body as if it were Satan and God in perpetual battle and he tackles God and Satan as if they were his own internal organs. Artaud’s final works maintain the dual concept of revolt he had been developing since before his Surrealist days, a revolt against tradition, against culture, against language but also a revolt confronted by the corporeal body — organs, emissions, genitalia. Artaud’s writing creates a sublimated uncompromising anti-libidinal counterpoint to that of his near contemporary D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence’s inherent messianic pleasure principle negated by Artaud’s bodily struggle — rather than intimate and animated, Artaud’s body exists as foreign and fragmented. More yuck than fuck. The corpus incorporates the soon-to-be corpse; the texts internalise the corporeal disintegration.
I believe we are the dead who exist beneath the dead
and we stink of a horrendous shit
These fragments and letters exemplify what Derrida commented on in his analysis of Artaud’s writings, that he is “Beating his flesh in order to reawaken it at the eve prior to the deportation”.
I think you must be bothering that eye
by having fucked up a pair of balls, for it
and some shit, that now has to be swallowed
through the entrails of its nose
and
I believe that’s the real truth
the raw, true and evident
true truth of the truth
Artaud continually moves toward an exit, an anti-vaginal re-birth or an eternally recurring death. In each of these fragments and letters, Artaud reinvents his birth and relives his death — both Heideggerian impossibilities. Artaud’s writing and artworks manifest an ante-natal and even anti-natal intentionality; a constant denial of a being towards the beginning and a persistent desire for a being toward the end. And where Heidegger mentions birth and moves swiftly on in an ever-metastasising proliferation of all things thanatic, Artaud struggles to transcend the moment and the horror and the ongoing terror of his bodily birth.
my birth: that was a horrendous struggle
an act of abysmal warfare
an extreme sin
This collection of fragments, letters, last works, collected, edited and translated by Barber, provides an intriguing glimpse into Artaud’s last months before his death, in 1948, from an accidental overdose of chloral hydrate — a favoured drug of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, André Gide and a component of the fatal cocktail in the Jonestown mass-murder suicides. But what Barber provides is an anti-institutional and energetic translation — some transcribed and traduced from Artaud’s original handwritten texts — that breathes life into these moribund works, gives them, in a sense, a rebirth.
The book closes with a collection of Artaud’s notebook drawings and glossolalia, each an attempt to escape language; yet, four days before his death, during Jean Desternes’s last visit to the clinic, Artaud told the journalist, “I am haunted — haunted for a long time now — by a kind of writing which is not within the norm. I’ve wanted to write outside of grammar, to find a means of expression beyond words. And now and then I’ve believed myself to be very close, to that kind of expression… but everything is driving me back to the norm”. And Artaud felt that from his earliest letters 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 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”.
Along with Infinity Land Press’s other Artaud publications, this important book –— with outstanding forensic topographic photographs by Karolina Urbaniak and an exquisite cover by Martin Bladh — increases and transforms our knowledge of Artaud’s life, death and work — all so intricately and essentially intertwined — or as Artaud would have put it, “tarabut rabut karviston rabut rabut kur a vitctron”.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Finbow’s current project — Anticipated Memories — will include an artist’s book, printed facsimiles and an exhibition.
