By : Anatole TENARD & Solène DESNOUE
Là où d’autres proposent des oeuvres, je ne prétends pas autre chose que de montrer mon esprit
Born in 1896 and deceased in 1948, Antonin Artaud was not just an author but an actor, essayist, versifier and a drawer. During the 52 years of his tormented life, poetry, theater and pilgrimages were several ways for him to capture scattered bits of a fleeing reality aswell as fighting against crippling sufferings, that were later diagnosed as hereditary siphyllis. Artaud did not only rely on art to fight the disease as many drugs (like morphine and laudanum) crawled their way deep in his veins and brain, slowly twisting his daily routine into a distraught quest.
Somatic afflictions had to share Artaud with others, more insidious, illnesses. He spent a decade switching between several psychiatric hospitals, asylums, prisons as he would say, treated for paranoid schizophrenia and erotomaniac deliriums by electroconvulsive therapies. Back in these days, the procedure was far different than what it is in our present time and mostly resembled the electric chair ordeal, thus more presumably affiliating with torture rather than medicine.
In this paper we shall unravel two of his main productions : L’ombilic des Limbes and Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu. Why precisely unriddling these two ? Because while the former is one of his first books ever – even if « book » is probably not the right word to describe this piece of art –, the latter, a provocative radiophonic creation written at the dusk of his life, has been broadcasted post-mortem. Besides different ways to express madness, or genius, depending on whether you like this surrealistic and distorted work or not, and also besides beeing published at two very different moments of his life, L’ombilic des Limbes and Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu express diametrically opposed feelings.
The poems of L’ombilic des Limbes, initially rejected by Jacques Rivière (director of the publishing house to which Artaud sent the manuscript) are not the creation of a demented man but of someone digging in his deepest self to extract powerful words and convictions. His poetry, inspired by surrealistic concepts, goes all the way down to the limbo where humanity dwells, corrupted by siphylitic pain and enraged wishes to understand incarnation’s mysteries. To Artaud, L’ombilic des Limbes had a tremendous cathartic value, sometimes turning the writing in a heavy clutter for an unaware reader, due to Artaud’s will to shed loads of acute discomfort through very few pages. If pain has already been used as material for many authors, Artaud keeps it raw and we do not read « something inspired by pain » but litteraly « a description of pain ».
After many years spent behind the walls of several asylums, Artaud managed to retrieve a long lost freedom allowing him to create Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu. First of all, we have to underline the d of dieu, usually written D, as Artaud insisted on avoiding the capital letter in an ultimate contempt towards god and everything related to him. Caught in a new but already old world, in what will soon be called the cold War, Artaud decided to crystallize all his psychic disruptions and all his hatred for the institutions in a last artwork, standing out of everything already created, throwing away politics, morals and customs to burn them at the pyre of madness. Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu adresses the issues of the American economic system, comparing it to a factory of cannon fodder and of human cattle, a reserve army for the globalization ; but it also adresses the poetry, spitting on its sublime rhymes and its elegiac nonsense. Alas, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu has only been broadcasted a few times, considered heathen, deranged, and probably too good at hiding a meaningful message behind meaningless words.
One could ask : what is the point of this paper ? The main goal is to show that art can materialize in a myriad of forms, and to democratize the psychotic art, usually shut down by the psychiatric instances or by « healthy » critics. Artaud was not alone in this fight, he had take part in symbolic battles as Vincent Van Gogh and Camille Claudel did in their time. If we believe Artaud is the best way to understand how patients affected by psychosis behave when it comes to language, another artist, Olivier de Sagazan (and his work Transfiguration), seems to perfectly show how psychotics « see », and how bodily anguishes can invade their whole subjectivity.
Words we have learned :
– Distraught : Eperdu
– Ordeal : Supplice
– Clutter : Désordre
– Pyre : Bûcher
– Cattle : Bétail