Antonin Artaud

The Scum of the Soul

Ros Murray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137310583
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book serves as analysis of the aesthetics of materiality in the multifaceted work of Antonin Artaud, one of Twentieth-Century France's most provocative and influential figures, spanning literature, performance, art, cinema, media and critical theory.

1

The Limits of Representation

Artaud’s early texts deal with the problem of creating a space where expression can take place, which is to say that they begin before the beginning, not with words, but with failed words that can only speak of their own inadequacy. In Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière (Correspondence with Jacques Rivière), Le Pèse-nerfs (The Nerve-Scales) and L’Ombilic des limbes (The Umbilicus of Limbo), the three collections he published between 1924 and 1925, Artaud gestures towards the very foundations of poetic language, where language always implies its own impossibility, creating an absence that coexists with the presence of the word. For Artaud the inability to begin writing, or the difficulty of creating such a space where poetry is possible, is an urgent problem. He writes to Rivière:

Il y a donc un quelque chose qui détruit ma pensée; un quelque chose qui ne m’empêche pas d’être ce que je pourrais être, mais qui me laisse, si je puis dire, en suspens. Un quelque chose de furtif qui m’enlève les mots que j’ai trouvés, qui diminue ma tension mentale, qui détruit au fur et à mesure dans sa substance la masse de ma pensée, qui m’enlève jusqu’à la mémoire des tours par lesquels on s’exprime et qui traduisent avec exactitude les modulations les plus inséparables, les plus localisées, les plus existantes de la pensée.

(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 mass of my thought, which is even robbing me of the memory of those turns of phrase with which one expresses oneself and which translate accurately the most inseparable, the most localized, the most living inflections of thought.)¹

This mysterious ‘something’ arises just at the point where Artaud attempts to write, and is a force that destroys the material substance of thought that he insists so heavily upon, removing the words that he has found to directly express the movement of thought. It is something impure, distorting his words, turning them into inadequate and immaterial remnants of a more truthful, anterior process. Artaud is left ‘en suspens’ (‘in suspense’),² his work perpetually ‘à naître’ (‘unborn’).³ This strange and unidentifiable force that impedes a more direct form of expression and is opposed to the materiality of thought might be understood as representation. What gradually becomes clearer in Artaud’s work is that it is in the very process of mediation that his thought emerges. Artaud perpetually searches for a direct form of expression that does not render the thinking process into a lifeless form representing something absent from the page on which it is inscribed. There is thus a distinction to be made between expression and representation, one which is, however, continually blurred, and Artaud’s own theories about representation are contradictory and extremely complex. This chapter will examine some of the problems raised by representation conceived as both a negative yet necessary and inevitable function of the ‘œuvre’.

(i) The physical pain of thinking

Artaud spent a great deal of time trying to describe the process of thinking, and what its relationship to the body was; this was the point of departure for his writing, and his early work deals with an incessant struggle to attempt to express his bodily and psychic experience through text. Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière, Le Pèse-nerfs and L’Ombilic des limbes are all premised on the belief that thinking and feeling cannot be separated. He writes to Rivière, ‘je souffre, non pas seulement dans l’esprit, mais dans la chair et dans mon âme de tous les jours’ (‘I suffer, not only in the mind but in the flesh and in my everyday soul’),⁴ continuing ‘je ne demande plus qu’à sentir mon cerveau’ (‘I no longer ask anything but to feel my brain’).⁵ The title Le Pèse-nerfs draws attention to the link between thinking and feeling, playing on ‘penser’ (to think), ‘nerfs’ (nerves), and the notion of weighing the thinking process or the nervous system as if thoughts were material. If thought for Artaud begins in the nervous system, it is because this system is conceived as a form of mediation between the self and the outside world. L’Ombilic des limbes incorporates in the title a sense of being perpetually in between different states, both through the idea of limbo, and through the umbilicus which is the mark of the separation of the body from its origins, literally from the womb but in metaphorical terms from what Artaud understands to be an original unity where the thinking process does not have to be separated into separate thoughts, or separate forms.

L’Ombilic des limbes comprises a series of descriptions of physical states, interspersed with short, mostly untitled poems, letters addressed to unnamed figures of authority (‘docteur’ (‘doctor’), ‘Monsieur’ (‘Sir’), ‘Monsieur le législateur de la loi sur les stupéfiants’ (‘The legislator of the law on narcotics’)), and an extract from a play, the characters also unnamed. Thought is spatial, substantial and a force in movement, described as ‘dense’, ‘un abîme plein’ (‘a filled abyss’), ‘un vent charnel’ (‘a carnal wind’), ‘un réseau de veines’ (‘a network of veins’), ‘la masse crispée’ (‘contracted mass’), ‘le gel’ (‘frost’) and ‘l’enveloppement cotonneux’ (‘woolly membrane’).⁶ This is a formless and difficult to grasp substance, yet it also appears as if it were a description of the physical brain and the neurological system. Artaud describes the movement of thought as a chemical process, emphasising resonance, vibration, ‘entrecroisement’ (intercrossing), distillation, detachment, trembling, stratification and reduction. The collection itself seems to reflect this amorphousness in the form that it takes, as a series of fragments, with imaginary characters who are, like the words that Artaud searches for, left in suspense, and aborted, untitled texts that do not follow a logical order. Artaud writes ‘toutes ces pages traînent comme des glaçons dans l’esprit’ (‘all these pages float around like pieces of ice in my mind’),⁷ in the opening text that he insists is not a preface, but a ‘glaçon aussi mal avalé’ (‘an ice-cube stuck in my throat’).⁸ Thinking is thus presented as a process of physical transformation, coming into being in a space between fragile states, acting like a melting ice cube or a chemical distillation. He states his intentions, writing, ‘il faut en finir avec l’Esprit comme avec la littérature’ (‘we must do away with the mind, just as we must do away with literature’), and ‘je voudrais faire un Livre qui dérange les hommes’ (‘I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad’),⁹ themes which pervade all of Artaud’s texts. What Artaud rejects as literature is the finished, coherent work coming from a recognisable author whose life can be distinguished from the work s/he produces. He writes: ‘ce livre je le mets en suspension dans la vie’ (‘I suspend this book in life’),¹⁰ the fragmentary collection becoming the material embodiment of his perpetually suspended or aborted thinking process.

Le Pèse-nerfs also explores the movement of thought through the body, again continually emphasising chemical processes, as Artaud describes thoughts as ‘ces segments d’âme cristallisés’ (‘crystallised segments of soul’),¹¹ and describes thinking as a type of osmosis or absorption. Thinking occurs not in time but in space: ‘à chacun des stades de ma mécanique pensante, il y a des trous, des arrêts, je ne veux pas dire, comprenez-moi bien, dans le temps, je veux dire dans une certaine sorte d’espace’ (‘At each of the stages of my thinking mechanism there are gaps, halts – understand me, I do not mean in time, I mean in a certain kind of space’).¹² Once again this plays out in the very form of the collection, which reads as a series of fragments interspersed with large amounts of blank space, where the text takes up considerably less room than the empty page that surrounds it. Artaud describes a ‘pèse-nerfs’ as ‘une sorte de station incompréhensible et toute droite au milieu de tout dans l’esprit’ (‘a kind of incomprehensible stopping place in the mind, right in the middle of everything’).¹³ It is a barrier to thought, but one which is, we might add, altogether necessary for the production of text.

There is a paradox inherent in these early texts, then, which is that the very impossibility of finding the right words and the impossibility of producing work is, perversely, what generates text. The period between 1924 and 1925, when Artaud wrote these three early texts describing his creative paralysis, was intensely prolific. It is also worth noting that he was already at this stage engaging with multiple forms of expression, getting involved with theatrical and cinematic projects as well as joining the Surrealists and publishing work in the journal La Révolution surréaliste. Indeed the crossing of boundaries between different types of media, as well as the rejection of the more conventional literary oeuvre in favour of collections of texts such as manifestos, letters and untitled fragments, might be seen as characteristic of the Surrealist movement as a whole. The distinction between Artaud’s form of ‘révolution’ and that of the Surrealists would later become far more evident, particularly in his rejection of all forms of political thought in favour of direct, corporeal experience (which in itself has been taken as a form of politics). In these early texts such a distinction was already apparent; one such example is the text that appeared in La Révolution surréaliste in 1925, ‘Position de la chair’ (‘Situation of the flesh’), in which Artaud writes: ‘Tous les systèmes que je pourrai édifier n’égaleront jamais mes cris d’homme occupé à refaire sa vie’ (‘All the systems that I shall ever construct will never equal my cries: the cries of a man engaged in remaking his life’).¹⁴ Surrealism, for Artaud, was first and foremost a question related to the flesh, and not to ideas.

This emphasis on the physicality of the body also plays out in the materiality of the text, and is strongly linked with the production of language. For Artaud, any barrier to the thinking process means its abrupt end, the formation of a concrete thought or a word, and also necessarily the creation of a thought-object or a form that is separate from the body. Artaud’s emphasis on materiality is in many respects contradictory, because whilst on the one hand he perceives the material object as something that conjures bodily presence and is a continuation of a gesture, and therefore something that can never be finished, on the other there has to be a moment when it is published, sent away from the body or discarded, that in some cases begins in the moment when it becomes a material object.

This contradiction is a painful one, and the impossibility of expression faced with its absolute necessity is linked to a physical feeling of anguish. Nowhere is this more evident than in these three early texts. For Artaud everything begins in the body and anything that is learned, rather than directly experienced through the body, cannot be trusted. In a letter addressed to the legislator of drug laws included in L’Ombilic des limbes he writes: ‘toute la science hasardeuse des hommes n’est pas supérieure à la connaissance immédiate que je puis avoir de mon être. Je suis seul juge de ce qui est en moi’ (‘all the fortuitous scientific knowledge of mankind is not superior to the immediate knowledge I can have of my being. I am the only judge of what is within me’).¹⁵ The letter describes opium not just as a way of relieving the physical problem of addiction, but as a cure for the separation of consciousness from the body, and the destruction of the materiality of consciousness that this implies. Artaud describes this ‘maladie’ (‘illness’) as what happens when ‘la conscience s’approprie, reconnaît vraiment comme lui appartenant toute une série de phénomènes de dislocation et de dissolution de ses forces au milieu desquels sa matérialité se détruit’ (‘consciousness appropriates, truly recognises as belonging to it, a whole series of phenomena of dislocation and dissolution of its forces in the midst of which its substance is destroyed’).¹⁶ There is a distinction between consciousness and thought, as he claims in this letter to have an intact consciousness but to be unable to think. Being unable to think, he writes, is not a problem of creating a concrete thought, but one of sustaining the thinking process. In other words, when the thinking process comes to its end in a finite thought, it fails: ‘je n’appelle pas avoir de la pensée, moi, voir juste et je dirai même penser juste, avoir de la pensée, pour moi, c’est maintenir sa pensée’ (‘by having thought I do not mean seeing correctly or even thinking correctly; having thought to me means sustaining one’s thought’).¹⁷ The thinking process must be a wholly conscious, material, sustained force.

If thinking is physical, occurring through the nervous system, and thoughts must be perpetually suspended, this makes thinking both impossible and painful. What are the implications of this for representation? This experience of anguish that Artaud describes is, he suggests, not representable, yet he attempts to describe it. The conception of thinking as being a process of the nervous system is an attempt to present thinking as an anti-representational process, if representation is understood, in opposition to a more direct form of expression, to signal the body’s absence or the separation of the thought-object from it. The rejection of one type of representation, however, entails a search for a new type of text that necessarily puts representative strategies into play, if only in order to destabilise the various systems on which they depend. Artaud is not alone in viewing representation as a negative and restrictive but inevitable force, and such a conception, as we have seen in these early texts, puts the very production of thought in danger. One might argue that this is a sign of Artaud’s ‘madness’, and that these texts simply describe a pathological, neurotic or paranoid reaction to representation, exacerbated by Artaud’s drug use and nascent mental health problems. However, the problem that Artaud identifies here is more fundamentally related to artistic creation, and cannot be purely reduced to what we know to have been his rather fragile mental state.

(ii) Artaud’s Pèse-nerfs and Schreber’s Nervensprache

To return to one of Artaud’s most important early publications dealing with the physical origins of thought, Le Pèse-nerfs, we might question more precisely what this title means. What is a ‘pèse-nerfs’ (‘nerve-scale’)? A set of scales (‘un pèse’) is an object used to gauge another object’s material properties, and might be seen as a kind of scientific in...