In January, Artaud had gone to the radio studio, where he’d listened once more to the whole piece with the cast and technicians. He had made a few cuts and even re-recorded a section, to ready it for the February 2 broadcast. Porché’s decision to withdraw the piece had been reached a few days before, but it was only communicated to the sickly Artaud on the first.
Throughout February, letters were written back and forth over the banning. There was a minor Parisian press war. In his outraged letter of February 4th to Porché, Artaud claimed that, after reviewing the tape himself back in January along with the rest of the show’s technicians (Artaud’s letter during his last two years were frequently broken up like poems), he had conscientiously let nothing “pass / that might infringe on / taste, / morals, / good manners, / honorable intentions, / or furthermore that might / exude / boredom, / familiarity, / routine, / I wanted a fresh work, one that would make contact with certain organic points of life, / a work / in which one feels one’s whole nervous system / illuminated as if by a miner’s cap-lamp / with vibrations / consonances / which invite / man / TO EMERGE / WITH / his body / to follow in the sky this new, unusual, and radiant Epiphany… ”
Fernand Pouey (who had commissioned the piece) scheduled a private studio broadcast, for the evening of February 5. The audience of fifty invited to the studio that night were to act as a jury and decide whether the piece merited rescheduling. Their names read like a Who’s Who of the arts in ’40s Paris: Raymond Queneau, Louis Jouvet, Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Georges Braque, Jean-Louis Barrault… That night the voices of the actors, whom, three months before, Artaud had rehearsed for over two weeks in almost daily trips from Ivry into Paris — Maria Casarés, who had played Death in Cocteau’s film Orphé; Roger Blin, who a double handful of years before had played one of the two mute assassins in The Cenci (Blin had also been The Cenci’s production assistant; besides writing the play, Artaud had in 1935 starred in and directed it as well), and whose productions of Genet a handful of years hence would galvanize the French theater; Paule Thévenin; and Artaud himself — went through the howls, screams, roarings, and sobs which Artaud had interlarded throughout this agonized work. Needless to say, the audience unanimously supported the broadcast. But even the most auspicious fifty supporters, when a work has been promised to a public of thousands, must still have been distressing for the writer — who was now dying from advanced rectal cancer.
In a letter to Pouey, written from Ivry two days after the private performance, Artaud declared: “… I do not understand how an incompetent, scarcely out of university, like Wladimir Porché, can take it upon himself to cancel the broadcast of a document that was ANNOUNCED several weeks ago / and consequently / listened to / by dozens of technicians who judged its value / and DECIDED / that it should be broadcast… ” There are other letters to the press. In response to some serious comment on the piece, in still another letter to Pouey and to the technical director René Guignard, in expectation of an eventual airing, on February 17 Artaud asked for a few more cuts in the tape from the introductory section: “I think that what certain people like Georges Braque found so overwhelming and exciting about the Radio Broadcast To Have Done with the Judgment of God are the parts where sound effects and xylophonics accompany the poems read by Roger Blin and Paule Thévenin. We must not spoil the effect of the xylophonics by the logical, dialectical, and argumentative quality of the opening section… / I beg you to make these cuts, / I beg you / both of you / to MAKE SURE that these cuts are carefully made. / There must be nothing left in this Radio Broadcast that might disappoint, / tire, / or bore / an enthusiastic audience which was struck by the freshness of the sound effects and xylophonics / which even Balinese, Chinese, Japanese, and Singhalese theater do not have… ”
Despite the jury of literary luminaries, however, station manager Porché remained adamant.
The play would not go out on the public airwaves.
Fernand Pouey resigned.
And in his last letter, to Thévenin on February 24th from his room at Ivry, a day after they had gone to dinner together at a Paris restaurant, Artaud wrote: “Paule, I am very sad and desperate, / my body hurts all over, / but above all I have the impression that people were disappointed in my radio broadcast. / Wherever the machine is / there is always the abyss and the void, / there is a technical intervention that distorts and annihilates what one has done. / The criticisms of M. and A. A. are unjust but they must have been based on some weakness in the transitions, / this is why I am through with Radio, / and from now on will devote myself / exclusively / to the theater / as I conceive it, / a theater of blood, / a theater which each performance will have done / something / bodily / to the one who performs as well as to the one who comes to see others perform, / but actually / the actors are not performing, / they are doing. / The theater is in reality the genesis of creation. / This will happen. / I had a vision this afternoon — I saw those who are going to follow me and who are still not completely embodied because pigs like those at the restaurant last night eat too much. There are some who eat too much and others like me who can no longer eat without spitting. / Yours, Antonin Artaud.” The cancer that agonized Artaud had reached the point where his doctor simply allowed him as much chloral as he wanted. Over the nine days after that last letter (1948 was a leap year) Artaud drew or chopped at his block or dosed himself into unconsciousness — and died.
In the Ivry-sur-Seine pavilion, his friends kept vigil by the body for three days — primarily to shoo off the rats that plagued the building but also to turn away the priests they feared Artaud’s family might send against the wishes of the militantly atheist blasphemer.
There is only one little point I would ask you to hold tightly to as we move on in this discussion. Those flawed “transitions” Artaud castigates himself for in this pathetic, terminal epistle are finally part of an entire pre-Artaudian critical system — a system that, clearly, Artaud himself was enmeshed in until he could criticize no longer, a system whose historical constitution (not as a series of rhetorical borrowings, which are all too easily traceable to Aristotle’s Poetics, but rather as an entire nineteenth-century discursive practice) is the real topic of our essay here. A flawed “transition” is the failing traditionally invoked when that romantic ideal, “unity of impression,” was assumed not to have been achieved: i.e., if all transitions between all the parts of an aesthetic work are perfect, then the whole must appear unified, Q.E.D. The presuppositions supporting such a critical system, however, are myriad. They include the unproblematic transparency between life and language, presentation and representation, intention and effect, and our ability to locate and respond to the “parts” themselves, as well as a psychological autonomy and a psychological malleability to the subject represented that flies in the face of practically any materialist critique, from the most vulgar to the most sophisticated. But more of that later.
Antonin Artaud was buried, without rites, on March 8, 1948.
Shall we look over the remainder of Artaud’s work?