Rivière’s answer — a reconfirmation of the rejection — was still generous in tone: But “… what prevents me for the moment from publishing any of your poems in La Nouvelle Revue Française [is that]… you do not usually succeed in creating a sufficient unity of impression.”
This “unity of impression” has been, of course, the smokescreen against just this problem at least since Poe pulled the phrase “unity of effect” out of Aristotle’s classical constraints on tragedy and put it into his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, in 1842. We are directly within that critical system for which flawed transitions are the privileged error.
Seven months passed.
The correspondence did not resume until the last days of January, 1924. In a new and sudden letter, Artaud confesses that he’d resented Rivière’s last answer. Artaud more or less says: I came to you as a mental case looking for sympathy. You answered with a literary judgement on “some poems which I did not value, which I could not value. I flattered myself that you had not understood me.” But, he goes on, “I see today that I may not have been sufficiently explicit, and for this too I ask your forgiveness.” He then proceeds “to finish that confession” which he had begun about his “distressing state of mind.”
He explains to Rivière:
This scattered quality of my poems, these defects of form, the constant sagging of my thought, must be attributed not to a lack of practice, a lack of control of the instrument I was handling, a lack of intellectual development, but to a central collapse of the soul, to a kind of erosion, both essential and fleeting, of the thought, to a temporary non-possession of the material benefits of my development, to an abnormal separation of the benefits of thought (the impulse to think, at each of the terminal stratifications of thought, passing through all the stages, all the bifurcations of thought and of form)….
I only want to say enough about it to be at last understood and believed by you.
Artaud concludes by telling Rivière he is sending along “the latest product of my mind,” i.e., another poem.
The poem in question, “Cri” (“Cry”), is in quatrains that link a series of surreal images, in which skies collide, a stable boy is ordered to guard wolves instead of horses, stars eat, slugs walk, angels return, and the sea boils. It begins and ends with “the little celestial poet,” who opens the shutters of his heart, and, at the end of it all, “Leaves his celestial place / With an idea from beyond the earth / Pressed to his long-haired heart.” There is an asterisk, then; and the terminal quatrain reads:
Two traditions met.
But our padlocked thoughts
Did not have room:
Experiment to be repeated.
It would be very hard, I suspect, for anyone to take “Cri” other than as a self-conscious embodiment of just the “awkwardnesses,” “oddities,” and “divergent images” Rivière had chided Artaud for in his response to the first submission. As such, there is something disconcerting and rather undergraduate about this second. It’s certainly not a poem that the editor of the NRF would be likely to have published in 1924—if only because of its fairly clear intention to ridicule, however ironically and by example, Rivière’s well-meant — and well-put — criticism.
Rivière did not get around to answering this one. I think it’s understandable why. He had rejected Artaud’s poems. And because he had presented himself as accessible and open on a personal level, he was being badgered to change his mind and take them anyway. There is one level where Artaud’s argument, no matter how intriguing, parallels one that anybody who has ever taught creative writing has gotten at least once from the belligerent student who has had his (it is almost always a he) work criticized and is unhappy about it: “What you call my mistakes aren’t that at all. They’re exactly what I intended to do. The uncomfortable and awkward effects they produce were what I wanted. They document how I was feeling about it all when I wrote it. You just didn’t understand that. But now that you do, don’t you think it’s better than you did?”
Indeed, the only thing that separates Artaud’s argument from that of the wounded student defending his run-on and fragmentary sentences, protesting that his misplaced modifiers, clichés, and wrongly used words are exactly what he meant to write, is the language Artaud uses to detail his position, the energy with which he expresses his ideas, and the general insight, acuity, and level of abstraction at which he pitches his argument. Artaud was canny enough not to say that he placed flaws in his work intentionally. Rather, he argues, because of his mental condition, he could not avoid flaws. Nevertheless, once they’d been committed, he recognized them as signs — documents — of that condition, and decided — intentionally and for aesthetic reasons — to let them stand because that’s what they were.
The problem that Artaud brings us to the edge of (and that the contemporary philosopher Derrida pulls out of Artaud’s arguments in two brilliant essays on the French poet and dramaturge) is whether or not we ever really think — and, by extension, whether or not we ever really create — anything “intentionally.” We create things that bear signs of order or disorder. We say, “I’m going to write a novel or a poem about X,” and then we go on to write a novel or a poem that may turn out to be about X or about something entirely other. Or we may not write anything at all. As the language centers of the brain offer up words to put down on paper, we decide to accept those words, or we decide to reject them and wait for others with which to replace them. But in terms of the offering-up itself, does intention really have anything to do with it? The blocked writer can intend to write until the cows come home; but he or she sits before the blank page and the wells yield no language.
Isn’t writing, finally, a responsive and non-understood process as opaque in its workings as life itself, which consciousness only oversees, overhears, and which the fiction of intention only tries to tame?
Perhaps intention is an empty philosophical category to mask this profound split in the consciousness of all speaking and writing subjects, a split where language never really cleaves to intention but is always in excess of it, or escapes it entirely, or contravenes it openly, or even fails to come near it.
Perhaps it is just this split that poets from Dante Alighieri to Yeats and Jack Spicer (not omitting Artaud) have dealt with by talking of their work as given to them, as dictated to them, as originating somewhere on the other side of a profound gap in the self, where intention has no sway.
And what happens to art if that is, indeed, the case?
But if Artaud’s psychological analysis is more precise — or even more honest — than that of the protesting student writer, the underlying emotional belligerence and the immaturity that propel them both are all too clearly the same. The most generous interpretation we can put on that aspect of Artaud’s argument is that this emotional morass may just be the “collapse of the soul” Artaud is writing of. Nevertheless that aspect was probably what made Artaud’s argument, no matter how astute, difficult to respond to.
A week shy of two months later, when he had still received no answer, Artaud sent a brief, curt note to Rivière:
My letter deserved at least a reply. Return, sir, my letters and manuscripts.
I would like to have found something intelligent to say to you to indicate clearly what divides us, but it is useless. I am a mind not yet formed, an idiot: think of me what you will.