Listening to Wagner, I have found him instructive, definitely. He is enjoyable, certainly. His music is beautiful, undeniably — in the terms in which he chose to make it so. Yet for me he remains a kind of super kitsch, and his philosophical aspirations far outdistance any possible achievement. But of such philosophical failures our age makes heroes: that is Artaud’s other lesson.
So far, in writing of Artaud, I have written only of Artaud-the-Myth. I have quoted him, synopsized him, and narrated his life only to highlight Artaud-the-Personality: the obscene, sensitive, energetic man, obsessed with the sensual, repelled by the sexual, critical, crusading, and at once hopelessly wounded, who is Artaud-le-Mômo.
But till now I have purposely avoided writing of Artaud-the-Mind — the problem of Artaud-the-Mind. For that problem, especially when paced at the center of such a personality, as it manifests itself (once we have located it) with each Artaudian sentence that strays to the edge of coherence to claw its way across into a derangement that, hopelessly mixed with the poetic, nevertheless signs itself as something outside of craft, consciousness, or considered reflection, that problem is what keeps Artaud outside of literature as well — hence outside of art. And, hence, allows us to use Artaud to construct a dialogue with all that is art itself, all that resides within the precincts of art, all that is Wagnerism in the broadest sense.
… the whole problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and the physical clarity of a feeling, to have it to such a degree that it is impossible for it not to be expressed, to have a wealth of words, of acquired turns of phrase capable of joining the dance, coming into play; and the moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me panting as if at the very door of life.
And now suppose that I feel this will physically passing through me, that it jolts me with a sudden and unexpected electricity, a repeated electricity. Suppose that each of my thinking moments is on certain days shaken by these profound tempests which nothing outside betrays. And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.
That is the twenty-seven-year-old Artaud writing to the editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, the well-known poet Jacques Rivière, ten years Artaud’s senior. It is also the clearest presentation of the problem’s core we have from Artaud himself. The story of the Correspondence with Jacques Rivière (1923-24) has often been recounted. But it is necessary to review it here, in order to locate precisely how the problem it atomizes so astutely finally allows, informs, and encourages the dialogue we must trace out.
Artaud was born at Marseille in 1896, into a close family, part French but mostly Levantine Greek. He was a brilliant, energetic, and — from certain angles — demonically good-looking young man. But an attack of meningitis, when he was seven or eight, may have been the physical origin of the mental problems that were to plague him throughout his life. Five years after starting a literary review at the Collège du Sacré Coeur and publishing his first poems in 1910, Artaud had his first breakdown and in his nineteenth year entered the first of the several mental asylums in which he would spend his early twenties. Between bouts of confinement, he spent nine months in the military, but was released on medical grounds. By twenty-four he’d begun to take laudanum. Still, by twenty-five, he had left the asylums to establish himself as an actor, both in plays and in films.
Artaud was talented, intelligent, good-looking, and luck broke in his favor on several occasions. While he never became an overwhelmingly popular public acting success, still his early theatrical years — now with Lugné Poe, now with Cocteau — were the stuff of legend. And he was also, now, writing and publishing poems and articles in various periodicals. Toward the end of April 1923, Artaud sent a small group of poems to Rivière at the NRF.
On May 1st, Rivière rejected them. “But,” Rivière wrote, generously and encouragingly, in his rejection note, “I am interested enough in them to want to make the acquaintance of their author. If it were possible for you to stop by the review some Friday between four and six, I would be happy to see you.” A month later, on June 5th, Artaud dropped in for a late Friday afternoon visit and chat. That same evening, Artaud composed a letter to Rivière, asking him to reconsider his rejection of the poems. His reasoning was most unusual.
“You must believe, sir, that I have in mind no immediate or selfish goal; I wish only to settle a desperate problem.” The problem that Artaud spelled out is the one with which we began this section. But that more articulate expression of it that we’ve already quoted is from later on in the correspondence. Here is Artaud’s first elaboration of it from his first letter 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 a 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…
This is why, out of respect for the central feeling which dictates my poems to me and for those strong images or figures of speech which I have been able to find, in spite of everything I propose these poems for existence [i.e., that Rivière reconsider taking them for the NRF]. These figures of speech, these awkward expressions for which you reproach me, I have noticed and accepted. Remember: I did not contest them. They stem from the profound uncertainty of my thought…
In showing you the poems, it seemed to me that their faults, their un- evennesses were not sufficiently flagrant to destroy the overall impression of each poem…
I cannot hope that time or effort will remedy these obscurities or these failings… And the question I would like to have answered is this: Do you think that one can allow less literary authenticity and effectiveness to a poem which is imperfect but filled with powerful and beautiful things than to a poem which is perfect but without much internal reverberation?… The question for me is nothing less than knowing whether or not I have the right to continue to think, in verse or in prose.
Artaud concluded with a promise to drop by on another Friday and bring Rivière the two small booklets of poems of his that had just been published, Trie Trac du Ciel and Douze Chansons.