It was hectoring. It was belligerent. It was disingenuously self-pitying (“… a mind not yet formed, an idiot…” indeed!). But three days later, on March 25th, Rivière returned an answer. In spite of everything, he had come to appreciate just those qualities of energy, acuity, and living language in Artaud’s letters. He wrote, “One thing strikes me: the contrast between the extraordinary precision of your self-diagnosis and the vagueness, or at least the formlessness, of your creative efforts.” Rivière went on, in his longest letter to date, to try to discuss Artaud’s problem at the same level of analysis that Artaud had.
I do not think Rivière’s analytical passages strike most readers today as very strong.
Thus it is even more to his credit that he could recognize (in the face of all Artaud’s emotional theatrics so transparently trying to mask simple, badgering rudeness) an impassioned and subtle analytical writer when Rivière could not offer an analysis of his own to equal it. Still, Rivière’s letter broached at least one important idea that Freud had put forth twenty-five years before, which seems germane:
You speak somewhere in your letter of the “fragility of the mind.” This fragility is superabundantly borne out by the mental disorders studied and catalogued by psychiatry. But it has not, perhaps, been sufficiently shown to what degree so-called normal thought is the product of chance mechanisms.
The suggestion here is, of course, that abnormal thought processes may provide insight into normal thinking. If you want to learn about the psychological mechanics of falling asleep, do you ask the exhausted quarryman whose eyes seal nightly within the minute his head hits the pillow — or do you ask the insomniac who has examined in anxious anticipation every instant of the painfully protracted process of dozing off? If you are seeking an anatomy of the creative impulse, do you ask the titanic artist who belches forth a rich and sumptuous novel in a week or six — or do you ask the hesitant, all-but-blocked poet, for whom each word is a travail and a gamble with an endless, obliterating silence? If you want to know the workings of the normal mind, do you ask the clearly, the smugly, the certainly and safely sane — or do you turn to those for whom “normal behavior” is only a fleetingly-arrived-at state, unretainable despite all effort, a state that tears itself to pieces between passages of derangement?
“I am keeping your poem,” Rivière concluded his letter; and added, perhaps more rashly than generously, “Send me everything you write.”
Enthusiastically, Artaud returned to the discussion they had already begun. (“One thing in your letter remains a little unclear to me,” he broke down to include toward the end, “and that is the use that you intend to make of the poem I sent you.” Anyone else, I suspect, would have realized Rivière had meant “I’m keeping the poem for my personal pleasure — but I’m still not publishing it.”) And in his answering letter of May 24th, Rivière begins:
An idea has occurred to me which I have resisted for some time but which I find extremely attractive… Why shouldn’t we publish the letter, or rather letters that you have written me? I have just reread again the one you wrote on the 29th of January. It is really altogether remarkable.
Rivière went on to suggest that “a little work of transposition” might make it easier on readers, turning the whole into a kind of “epistolary novel.” Artaud had already taken advantage of Rivière’s request to send more work. One of the things sent, besides more poems, was an essay on the painter Uccello, which showed some of the same analytic perspicacity as the best parts of his letters. Now Rivière all but recanted: “Perhaps we could also include a bit of your poetry or of your essay on Uccello?”
Artaud responded: “Why lie, why try to put on a literary level something which is the cry of life itself, why give an appearance of fiction to that which is made of the ineradicable substance of the soul…?” And in a letter immediately after that, he went back to his central problem: “My mental life is shot through with petty doubts and peremptory certainties which express themselves in lucid and coherent words. And my weaknesses are of a more precarious structure, they are themselves nebulous and badly formulated…” A final, lengthy, sympathetic letter from Rivière concludes the exchange. Towards the end of it, Rivière again quotes Artaud back at himself:
You wrote me: “I have, to cure me of the judgment of others, the whole of the distance that separates me from myself.” Here is the function of this “distance”: it “cures us of the judgment of others”; it prevents us from doing anything to bribe this judgement, or accommodate ourselves to it; it keeps us pure, and in spite of the variations in our reality, it assures us a greater degree of identity… There is no absolute danger except for him who abandons himself; there is no complete death except for him who acquires a taste for dying.
Affectionately,
Jacques Rivière
It was decided to publish, in addition to the letters, only “Cri”—as it was really a part of one of them — and not the Uccello essay or anything else. The correspondence appeared in the September 1, 1924 issue of the NRF. Shortly afterwards, it was released as a small book. Certainly, more than any of his poems, it laid the base for Artaud’s literary reputation. It also defined, both for Artaud and for his early readers, what was to become — apart from the theater as a paradigm for art — Artaud’s overriding theme: his own ever-inwardly-collapsing creative condition. But even more importantly, what the correspondence did and still does — in exactly the way the belligerent creative writing student’s protests would, if we took them seriously — is throw into question all the underlying precepts of artistic craft, content, reference, and communication that, unspoken, nevertheless and always underlie, support, and allow any location of artistic value in its connotations, suggestions, and resonances.
For connotations, suggestions, and resonances must be organized around denotations, statements, and clearly defined objects or they are connotations, suggestions, and resonances of nothing. The whole notion of art as we know it demands something immediate, meaningful, and made or chosen with some sort of conscientious skill. It is not that the work of art must be a representation. Rather the work of art must be, somehow, a manifestation of an intention — and readable as such from the signs it displays. This is true even when the intention is specifically (as it is in many modernist pieces) to create something that bypasses one, another, or a whole group of intentions usually associated with the art of a previous era. If the work is not a manifestation of an intention (is not a representation in signs of a certain psychology), then — and this is the danger that Artaud’s “problem” opens us to — it can be anything and everything. Not only do all classical standards vanish, but there is no way to distinguish between art and anything else, from found objects and scenes in nature… to the maunderings of the mad — or of the bourgeois banal.
This is precisely the situation Artaud would go on to explore — joyously, polemically — in what is perhaps his most concentrated intellectual performance, the central essay of The Theater and Its Double, “No More Masterpieces.” He would even, in that essay, suggest some solutions to the dilemma. But this problem of intention, which Artaud highlights in such an intriguing way, is why it is so hard to read signs of [a] failure of execution or [b] lack of intention (and we must remember that [a] is just a subset of [b]) as signs of an alternate intention — whether the justification put for that reading is the creative writing student’s clumsy selfdefense or Artaud’s far more refined one. Yet this is the problem various formalisms invariably leave us with — precisely as they try to avoid what they call the intentional, or the referential, or the communicational fallacy. And that is why Artaud’s argument — as well as his seemingly formless, extravagant works, in which madness and the unconscious clearly and constantly triumph over reason and conscious thought — is particularly important to the contemporary, post-modern formalists which, more or less, we have all become… especially as it prompts “intentional” readings of the sort Derrida has made of it.