Antonin Artaud: Nature, the Apocalypse, and van Gogh's Art

Het leven is voor niemand lang en de kwestie is maar, iets er mee te doen.

Vincent van Gogh: Letter to Theo from April 1885[1]

Il paraît que dans le livre Ma Religion Tolstoï insinue que quoiqu'il soit d'une révolution violente, il y aura aussi une révolution intime et secrète dans les gens, d'où renaîtra une religion nouvelle ou plutôt quelque chose de tout neuf, qui n'aura pas de nom, mais qui aura le même effet de consoler, de rendre la vie possible, qu'autrefois avait la religion chrétienne.

Vincent van Gogh: Letter to Theo from September/October 1888[2]

 

2. Artaud's way of dealing with suffering, madness, silence, and the meaning of the inarticulate voice makes it clear that he is not a thinker that can be easily identified with, appropriated, or applied by readers. As Susan Sontag has underlined, Artaud, in spite of his distinction, remains profoundly undigestable[6], an unassimilable voice and presence[7]. Always ready to denounce new forms of alienation disguised by cultural mediations, Artaud centers his discourse around the concepts of rupture, separation, and absence. By so doing, he undermines the very presupposition of religion in so far as it deploys its own essence as re-ligare, the re-binding of the self to its supposedly transcendent origin. In reaction to society's rejection of his discomfitting ideas, Artaud gathered the dispersed members of the vast modern family of mad or presumably mad geniuses into an arbre martyrologique[8] [martyrological tree] that reaches from François Villon at the end of the Middle Ages to the socially alienated philosophers and poets of the 19^th century: Friedrich Hölderlin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Søren Kierkegaard, Lautréamont and Friedrich Nietzsche. The artistic tradition and canon of masterpieces to which Artaud was heir culminates in Vincent van Gogh. For Artaud, an exposition of his paintings not only constitutes a historical event in art history, but of histoire historique tout court [9] [historical history pure and simple], since van Gogh -- with his abasourdissante authenticité [10] [stunning authenticity] -- calls into question the very foundations of Occidental society. Not surprisingly, the defenders and vindicators of this society are portrayed as the actual exécuteurs [11] [executioners] of van Gogh and the other martyrised heroes, whose creations corroborate Artaud's basic insight that [n]ul n'a jamais écrit ou peint, sculpté, modelé, construit, inventé, que pour sortir en fait de l'enfer[12] [nobody has ever written, painted, sculptured, modelled, constructed, invented except, in fact, to get out of hell]. Since Artaud identified hell with the total sum of the alienating conditions of existence, he regarded himself, like van Gogh, to be just one more infernal escapee: Je suis aussi comme le pauvre van Gogh [...].[13] [I am also like poor van Gogh (…).]

 

3. In his correspondance, Artaud depicts his radio poem as un modèle en reduction de ce que je veux faire dans le Théâtre de la cruauté [14] [a model on a small scale of what I want to do in the Theatre of cruelty]. Inasmuch as this major text -- with its xylophonic sounds, screams, guttural noises and voices -- constitutes une 1^re mouture du Théâtre de la Cruauté [15] [a first grinding of the Theatre of Cruelty], Artaud considers it an example of métaphysique en activité [16] [metaphysics in activity], thereby implying a counterbalance to the mainly psychological orientation of Western theatre and its emphasis on the oral. In Le Théâtre et son double, Artaud concisely summarizes the programme of his theatrological metaphysics: Briser le langage pour toucher la vie, c'est faire ou refaire le théâtre […]. [17] [To shatter language in order to touch life is to make or remake the theatre (…).] Since the deceitful fixations and ostensible invariants of language hinder the adequate perception of the ever-changing manifestations of life, Artaud's theatre seeks to reveal life's cruel essence through use of a language that, not being articulate, does not communicate determinate thoughts, but instead draws attention to the Parole avant les mots[18] [Speech before the words], or rather to the nécessité de la parole [necessity of speech] in counterdistinction to the parole déjà formée[19] [speech already formed]. By exploring the potentialities of the unspoken before language, the Théâtre de la Cruauté becomes the locus in quo of a radicalised perception of life's immediacy. Eventually, Artaud's theatre will subsume the functions traditionally assigned to philosophy and religion, and thereby provide a focal point at which the re-constitution of man at the end of the so-called Heilsgeschichte could take place.

 

4. To have done with the judgement of god purportedly marks the end of the Christian-occidental conception of the history of salvation in so far as it presumes the eternal articulation of the Logos through the godly Father and forsees its fulfilment in god's ultimate judgement over mankind. Artaud criticizes this apocalyptic end, and the creational beginnings it presupposes, by focusing on the alienating logocentrism of their metaphysical structure. Tellingly, Artaud writes in the Dossier of his radio poem: L'apocalypse générale historique a commencé.[20] [The general historical apocalypse has begun.] Apocalypse in this context does not purport a forseen end of time from a creational perspective. It implies rather the historical ending of the theological perspective out of which the world of alienation originated. Strictly speaking, Artaud envisages an apocalypse of the apocalypse, i.e. a meta-apocalypse that exposes creation as an integral part of the revelational articulations of a god whose logocentrism is the foundational lie of that history of perdition which religion calls the history of salvation. Seen against this background, the profusion of cries and screams in Artaud's apocalyptic theatre indicates an undoing of speech which ultimately seeks to dismantle the Logos as the source of deliverance. Since Artaud's meta-apocalypse intends to destroy the hell of that language which mendaciously asserts itself as the place in which truth is manifested, he recurs to the a-theological strategy of subverting the trinitarian soteriology in toto by putting it under the sign of an evil principle. Such a strategy implies a fundamental amplification of the sphere of evil (as understood, for example, by Christian gnosticism), for the evil God is, according to Artaud, not just the Creator of this World, but also the Father of the Word. Within Artaud's a-theological redefinitions, the rejection of the logocentric god of deceit does not occur through the workings of a deus alienus that sends his redeeming Son to the world, but through the lucid understanding and acceptance of the actual dimensions of Becoming.[21]

 

5. In the dossier related to his radio poem, Artaud underlines that he wrote the piece in order to protest against the so-called principle of virtuality and unreality.[22] One should bear in mind this declaration of intent when reading the central chapter concerning La Recherche de la Fécalité [The Research of Fecality] and the letter Artaud sent on February 20, 1948 to the Dominican priest Laval. In these texts, Artaud tries to show that Christian spirituality and its rituals, on the one hand, and sexuality and eroticism, on the other, are not – as oftentimes assumed - contradictory opposites, since their common goal is the displacement of the reality of the human body. After having established the equation Merde = Être = Vide [Shit = Being = Void], Artaud proceeds to ask the decisive anti-theological question: Connaissez-vous quelque chose de plus outrageusement fécal que l'histoire de dieu et de son être: Satan [...]? [23] [ Do you know anything more insultingly fecal than the history of god and of his being: Satan? ] The supposedly good Creator brings forth evil Creation out of his own necessity, for both Creator and Creation are, in the last resort, functions of an all-encompassing emptiness distinct from the actually Real which Artaud terms la vie physique extérieur [24] [the exterior physical life]. Everything that tries to escape or distract from this Reality is, according to Artaud, the purgatory of a demonic world that originates in the foundational lie of the logocentric god: Et dieu a voulu faire croire à l'homme en cette réalité du monde des démons.[25] [And god has wanted to make man believe in this reality of the world of demons.] These demons are the embodiment of the circulus vitiosus of sexual pleasure and Christian guilt that can only be overcome by exposing god's emptiness as the source of man's alienation. Consequently, Artaud rejects the example of Christ, who in face of the blood-sucking morpion dieu [26] [louse god], agreed to live without a body. In opposition to Christ's renunciation, Artaud envisions an army of men coming down from their cross, where the empty and emptying god had nailed them since time immemorial. The revendication and recuperation of the body brought about by this un-godly revolt signalizes the meta-apocalyptic suppression of the godly Word that condemns man to be forever torn apart by the conflicting forces of spirit and sex. From this perspective, Artaud's radio poem is the explication of a terminal cry announcing the emergence of a CORPS PUR[27] [PURE BODY] that is capable of recognizing in the deceit of the PUR ESPRIT[28] [PURE SPIRIT], the impurity originating in displacement and repression. Since [l]e corps toujours vivant du Golgotha [29] [the always living body of Golgotha] is called to prevail over the blind phantoms of the merely inner life, the last apocalyptic cry is not an imploring prayer, but the Pure One's token of victory.

 

6. For Artaud, purity is always a major trait of lucidity. Thus the men descending from the cross renounce the comforts of a disembodied spirituality, as well as foreshadow a realistic ascetism of the intellect. As witnesses of the cruelty of unmediated Becoming, they fulfill a task comparable to that of van Gogh, whom Artaud considered a martyr d'insupportables vérités [30] [of unbearable truths]. Since Artaud is well aware of the difficulties in grasping the uniqueness of van Gogh's illumination, he is careful to avoid any confusion of the artist's peculiar gifts with traditional mysticism, madness or even with a sort of surrealism avant la lettre. In van Gogh's paintings Artaud finds no phantoms, visions or hallucinations. Drama, subject matter, and objects[31] are actually also missing, for van Gogh's primary motif is la nature nue et pure vue [32] [naked and purely seen nature]. Unlike Paul Gauguin who sought to enlarge the objects of life to mythical dimensions, van Gogh attempted to déduire le mythe des choses les plus terre-à-terre de la vie[33] [deduce myth from the most earth-bound things of life]. Thus, his art provides corroboration of Artaud's conviction that la réalité est terriblement supérieure à toute histoire, à toute fable, à toute divinité, à toute surréalité [34] [reality is terribly superior to all history, all fable, all divinity, all surreality]. As the hero of a lucidité supérieure [35] [superior lucidity], van Gogh grasps reality solely through his painting: Rien que peintre, van Gogh, et pas plus / pas de philosophie, de mystique, de rite, de psychurgie ou de liturgie, / pas d'histoire ou de poésie [...].[36] [Only painter, van Gogh, and nothing more, / no philosophy, mysticism, rite, psychurgy or liturgy, / no history or poetry (…).] Therefore Artaud not only acclaims van Gogh as le plus vraiment peintre de tous les peintres [37] [the most truly painterly of all painters], but also stresses that he was unique in his ability to move beyond painting as an inert act of represention to painting as the fount of une force tournante, un élément arraché en plein cœur [38] [a turning force, an element torn from the full heart]. The purity of the painterly means with which van Gogh realizes his pictorial vision is inseparable from his terrible idée fanatique, apocalyptique d'illuminé [39] [terrible, fanatical, apocalyptical idea of illuminee]. Thus, when le pauvre van Gogh [poor van Gogh] set the world on fire with his purely pictorial instrumentality, he was actually rendering visible an unprecedented apocalyptic consummation. Thereby, the immediacy of Becoming reduces god's own eschatological judgement over mankind to its true vacuity.

 

7. When Artaud depicts van Gogh's painting as apocalyptic art he is hinting at its essential connection to cruelty as a means of achieving a metaphysical transformation of reality comparable to that of the new form of theatre he envisaged. Both, Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and van Gogh's apocalyptic painting, signalize a temps du mal [40] [time of evil] in which art exerts its own peculiar cruelty on the preexisting cruelty in nature in order to overcome it. Not surprisingly, the well-known Gnostic strategy of adding evil to evil as a way of achieving its contrary pervades Artaud's work. In Héliogabale ou l'anarchiste couronné [Heliogabalus or the Crowned Anarchist] for instance, Artaud refers to the hero's procedure of eliminating war and anarchy by contributing to them.[41] This remarkable addition of evil is in a way a repetition of Being through the human genius in order to accomplish an ontological transformation. Such a procedure foreshadows the one used in the radio poem when Artaud's historical apocalypse reduplicates the theological apocalypse in order to attain liberation from god's alienating emptiness. In this context it is noteworthy that although Artaud, toward the end of his life, considerably radicalized his critical views on religion, he continued to articulate his understanding of van Gogh's art in the language of traditional magic. Hence van Gogh is described as engaged in une de ces opérations d'alchimie sombre qui ont pris la nature pour objet et le corps humain pour marmite ou creuset [42] [one of these operations of sombre alchemy that have taken nature as object and the human body as pot or crucible]. Furthermore, Artaud considers that the art of van Gogh corresponds to the Grand Œuvre [...] d'une sempiternelle et intempestive transmutation [Grand Work of a sempiternal and untimely transmutation], since it opens up for non-pictorial nature la porte occulte d'un au-delà possible, d'une réalité permanente possible [43] [the hidden door of a possible beyond, of a permanent, possible reality]. Lastly, van Gogh's existential magic aims, according to Artaud, at a so-called re-transpiration [44] [re-transpiration] of nature by art, i.e. a re-creation of a nature that is truer than true nature because it is the manifestation of nature's cruelty being surmounted by the cruelty inflicted by the insightful artist. From this perspective, van Gogh's magical recreation of nature constitutes not only a modern pendant to Héliogabale's monothéisme magique[45] [magical monotheism] and a complimentary occidental expression of the metaphysical power Artaud perceived and admired in the Balinese theatre.[46] It is also an outstanding example of the metaphysical efficacy Artaud was seeking to attain in his own theatrology, since it envisaged an unspectacular, but nevertheless profound transformation of man's attitude toward life: Le sorcier [...] a rendu la nature, / mais c'est une nature plus belle d'avoir été faite par la sorcellerie que par la naure, / et je crois plus durable aussi, / une nature qui pourrait nous rassurer d'être en vie. [47] [The sorcerer has rendered nature, / but it is a more beautiful nature for having been made more by magic than by nature, / and I believe also more lasting, / a nature that could reassure us of being alive.]

 

8. For Artaud, no books or works of art had retained their value after his nine-year psychiatric isolation except those of van Gogh.[48] Thus it is not by chance that his essay on van Gogh turns out to be a metaphysical vindication of the painter. The way in which Artaud addresses the charges raised against van Gogh concerning his madness and suicide makes it clear that his main goal is the subversion of the whole world-view on which these accusations are based. Artaud's basic contention is that van Gogh was not a madman, but extra-lucide [49] [extra-lucid] , and that he did not commit suicide, for it was society that suicided him, as is already announced in the title of the essay. According to the Post-Scriptum of the Introduction, van Gogh was a man that had found his Moi humain [human Ego] and by this very fact had succeded in withdrawing himself from society. Its reaction was the death penalty that Artaud depicts by using the rather paradoxical transitive form of the French verb for commiting suicide: [la société] le suicida [50] [ (society) suicided him]. Artaud views society's execution of van Gogh as the logical conclusion of a mechanism set in motion by the psychiatric experts who passed judgement on his mental health. Since van Gogh had attacked not only the conformism of manners, but also that of institutions,[51] the medicine establishment reacted like une espèce de garde suisse pour saquer à sa base l'élan de rébellion revendicatrice qui est à l'origine du génie [52] [a sort of Swiss guard that cuts off at its base the outburst of recuperative rebellion that is the origin of genius]. Assuming that la psychiatrie a été [...] inventée pour défendre la conscience présente, pour enlever à certaines facultés supra-normales tout droit d'entrer dans la réalité [53] [psychiatry has been invented to forbid present consciousness, to take away from certain supranormal faculties every right to enter reality] Artaud underlines that there was no way for psychiatry to cope with van Gogh's illumination but to present it as illness. Against this background, van Gogh appears as an aliéné authentique [authentic madman] that has prefered to assume madness in the social sense of the term, than to forfaire à une certaine idée supérieure de l'honneur humain [54] [forfeit a certain superior idea of human honour]. To assail such honesty, paroxysms of social condemnation will eventually be taken to extremes as society takes possession of van Gogh and becomes his executioner.[55] Since possession and subsequent destruction of the body is society's punishment for those who dare to liberate themselves from the chains of enticing Spirit, it is not surprising that Artaud portrays the spiritualized and thus bloodless Société des êtres [Society of beings] as a vampire whose object is l'exploitation indéfinie du corps de l'homme humain [56] [the indefinite exploitation of the body of humane man]. Like the crowd's rebellious descent from the cross in Artaud's radio poem, van Gogh's conquest of his own Moi humain [human Ego] is a libertarian revendication of a life lived in the lucidity of the flesh. In contrast to Christ's decision to live in the spirit without a body, van Gogh recovers his body, but is assassinated by the Esprit [Spirit] that controls society. In the last resort, la conscience bestiale de la masse [57] [the brutish consciousness of the mass] and the subtleties of spiritualisation conjoin their powers in order to first alienate and then possess those bodies otherwise destined for freedom.

 

9. Artaud envisions redemption through a post-religious art that withdraws itself from language and seeks to attain the immediacy of the body. Hence Artaud underlines that his notion supérieure du théâtre [...] nous rendra à tous l'équivalent naturel et magique des dogmes auxquels nous ne croyons plus [58] [superior notion of theatre will render to all of us the natural and magical equivalent to the dogmas in which we no more believe]. In Héliogabale Artaud suggests a similar line of thought when he evokes a temple resembling a vast theatre où tout serait vrai [59] [where everything would be true], or when he elaborates on the issue of monothéisme magique [60] [magical monotheism] attributed to Héliogabale himself. Inspite of its theological connotations, the term implies a critical view of religion that anticipates Artaud's own a-theological overcoming of logocentric religiosity by his metaphysics in activity. Although Gnostic structures of thought pervade Artaud's metaphysical outlook, it differs profoundly from most western forms of Gnosticism, since no deus alienus [alien God] is forseen that could bring about the return of fallen Creation to its primal unity. Instead of recurring to a godly principle of reunification, Artaud stresses the redemptive function of the unmediated confrontation with all-encompassing Becoming, thereby remaining true to the Nietzschean insight concerning the death of God and the necessity of surmounting the theological sense of loss. Significantly, Artaud draws attention to the congeniality of van Gogh and Nietzsche and apostrophizes the painter as an illuminee and martyr not in spite of his atheism, but on account of it. Like Nietzsche, van Gogh had the required attentiveness à déshabiller l'âme, à délivrer le corps de l'âme, à mettre à nu le corps de l'homme, hors des subterfuges de l'esprit.[61] [to undress the soul, to release the body from the soul, to lay bare the body of man beyond the subterfuges of the spirit]. Consequently, van Gogh never sought to beautify life, but to make une autre [vie], purement et simplement une autre [62] [another (life), purely and simply another]. Such a life is directed to joining ce coudoiement naturel des forces qui composent la réalité, afin d'en tirer un corps qu'aucune tempête ne pourra plus entamer [63] [this natural elbowing of the forces that make up reality, in order to draw out a body that no tempest will ever again impair]. By bearing witness to the redemptive cruelty of reality, le roi van Gogh [64] [king van Gogh] made himself a lightning rod for the rage of a society used to the comforts of a delusive peace. Unable to assimilate van Gogh, the logic of the world he overcame reasserted its secular enmity of immediacy by destroying him. As a martyr of non-mediation, van Gogh constitutes for Artaud the most eminent historical counterfigure to the crucified Logos of Christianity.

 

10. By inveighing against the subterfuges of mediation, Artaud attacks not only Christian logocentrism, but also the prevalent forms of idealism that present themselves as the culminating philosophic translation of Christian truth. Since language is not capable of articulating and organizing the intellectual path to a Beyond, metaphysics can no longer be understood as a means of transcending the World through the Word. It implies rather the critical activity that unmasks the emptiness of transcendence and conduces to cis-cendence, the transient core of the real. Given the salvational relevance Artaud assigns to art, it is not surprising that the art of his time could hardly meet his expectations. In a telling passage he writes: Et s'il est encore quelque chose d'infernal et de véritablement maudit dans ce temps, c'est de s'attarder artistiquement sur des formes, au lieu d'être comme des suppliciés que l'on brûle et qui font des signes sur leurs bûchers.[65] [And if there is still something infernal and truly cursed in this time, it is to linger artistically over forms, instead of being like tormented people that are being burnt and make signs from their stakes.] For Artaud, only the artists that confront the fire of Becoming are capable of pronouncing the final judgement over the supposedly redemptive acts of the Spirit. The a-logic of their art culminates in the revelation of fulfillment through immediacy: the Apocalypse.

  

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