In 1924, a young poet submits his work to Jacques Rivière, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française. The editor rejects his work but, finding it interesting, seeks to make acquaintance with the poet; they meet and a correspondence ensues. That poet is Antonin Artaud; the correspondence has become famous.
These questions as I reread the Correspondence: Does Artaud want to write poetry? Or is it, in contrast, to plunge literature into a kind of incapacity, the ‘uncan’ [impouvoir] such that it speaks not of the world in which we live happily or unhappily but a kind of tear which passes through this world, a privation which divides the world in itself such that it calls for a writing that is likewise torn? An eroded writing, half-destroyed, a writing which is cracked and fissured whose refusal to bring itself into a finished and well-rounded form is an answer to what calls it into being: this is the work – To Have Done With the Judgement of God, The Theatre of Cruelty – for which Artaud will be celebrated; at this time, however, even Umbilical Limbo and Nerve Scales are ahead of him. The poems he submits are relatively polite and well formed; yet what he wants his correspondent to grasp is that this poetry corresponds to his own mental ruin.
I suffer from a fearful mental disease. My thought abandons me at every stage. From the mere fact of thought itself to the external fact of its materialisation on words. Words, the forms of phrases, inner directions of thought, the mind’s simplest reactions, I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Thus, when I am able to grasp a form, however imperfect, I hold on to it, afraid to lose all thought. As I know I do not do myself justice, I suffer from it, but I accept it in fear of complete death.
Artaud complains he falls short of thought; yet he seems to have the faith that such thinking, were he to receive the power to determine its form, would be possible. A view subtly different to that of his correspondent.
At first Rivière wants to comfort his correspondent by telling him he will one day come into the full possession of his powers: Artaud’s suffering will be part of that work he will one day realise; the fragmentation of his mind will be overcome. Yet it is not reassurance Artaud seeks; in his acute and patient letters, Artaud watches over his own poetry as it attests to the impossibility of thinking.
Why, though, express this impossibility? Why not take refuge in silence? Artaud: ‘Well, my weakness and my absurdity is I must write at all costs and express myself. I am a man whose mind has greatly suffered and as such I have a right to speak’. A right to speak? But what permits such a right?
Artaud links his name to Tzara, Breton and Reverdy; all of them, he writes, are touched by a ‘weakness’ that is similar to Artaud’s own ‘physiological weakness’ – yet what distinguishes him is his relationship to what is ‘outside thought’. Whatever the source of the malaise of a time, it is only Artaud who suffers, who physically suffers. ‘Speaking for myself, I can honestly say I am not in this world and such a statement is not merely an intellectual pose’. Then it is the extent of this suffering that lends him this right. It is the truth of the testimony that he, Artaud, can give in his ruined, unpublishable poetry.
What becomes visible in these letters is that it is the ruin of literature that such thinking demands. Thus he will claim for himself a ‘profound faculty’; he has the capacity to write, except ‘at the instant the soul proposes to coordinate its riches’ this capacity is interrupted; Artaud remains in perpetual pursuit of such coordination; the imperfection of his poems are attributable to the necessities of this pursuit: when he finds, however fleetingly and unsatisfactorily, a form for his thought, he must ‘hold on to it, afraid to lose all thought’; this is the significance of his poems.
This is not a matter of the retreat of poetic inspiration; Artaud is not a writer who is blocked, but a writer dispossessed of the means of writing. ‘This is also why I told you I had nothing further, no work in the offing, the few things I submitted to you being the vestiges of what I was able to salvage from the utter void’, he writes; what he seeks is for Rivière to understand his that his poems, however unsatisfactorily, manifest his mental existence.
Wha, then, does poetry matter? ‘I am unattached to poetry’, he realises in May 1924, yet it is in poetry nevertheless that Artaud was able to give form to the void. The problem is the poetry itself: it remains too weak; it falls short of the experience to which it would belong. Is this why, later that same month, he responds affirmatively to Rivière’s suggestion to publish their correspondence? ‘Why lie, why try to put something which is life’s very cry on a literary level? Why fictionalise something made from the soul’s ineradicable essence, which is like the complaint of reality?’ Artaud agrees to publication on condition that nothing is changed; the correspondence must stand as it is.
Still, one might suspect a sleight of hand: it is as if the poems require supplementing – such that, with an account of their composition, of the vicissitudes of their author, Artaud might overcome their inadequacy. But it is the other way round: it is so they will stand in their incompletion, in the impossibility of thinking to which they answer, that their correspondence must swirl round the poems.
Why did Rivière seek to publish Artaud’s correspondence? I wonder whether he sensed that Artaud’s work answers to one of the fundamental experiences of modern literature, wherein the poem bears upon its own emergence. Here, of course, it is not the splendid realisation of the Dunio Elegies that is at issue, but poems which Rivière deems unpublishable. But this is another side of modernity: broken works can now be understood as issuing from the same source as splendid ones; what matters, perhaps, is a kind of experience to which even the ruined poem would answer. After Surrealism, this experience is linked to a new kind of thinking; a mode of poetic research which supercedes philosophy.
‘Outside thought’: that is Artaud’s expression. Isn’t it the outside, thought’s outside, that Foucault and Deleuze will celebrate?
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