Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  Here again I am afraid of ambiguity. I would like you really to understand that it is not a question of that more-or-less of existence which emerges from what is commonly called inspiration, but of a total absence, a veritable extinction.

  This is also why I told you that I had nothing, no work in progress; the few things I showed you constituting scraps that I was able to wrest from utter nothingness.

  It is very important for me that the few manifestations of spiritual existence which I was able to give myself be not considered inexistent through the fault of the blots and unacceptable expressions scattered throughout them.

  It seemed to me as I showed them to you that their faults, their unevennesses were not so glaring as to destroy the whole impression of each poem.

  Please believe, sir, that I have no immediate or selfish end in view, I want only to settle a crucial problem.

  For I cannot hope that time or work will remedy these obscurities or these weaknesses; that is why I demand this existence, aborted though it be, with so much insistence and disquiet. And the question to which I would like an answer is: Do you think that one can attribute less literary authenticity and power of action to a poem which is perfect but without much inner reverberation? I admit that a review like the Nouvelle Revue Française requires a certain formal level and a great purity of substance, but without this, is the body of my thought so confused and its general beauty rendered so ineffectual by the impurities and indecisions scattered through it, that it doesn’t succeed literarily in existing? The whole problem of my thought is what is at stake. It is a question for me of nothing less than knowing whether or not I have the right to continue to think, in verse or in prose.

  I shall permit myself one of these Fridays to offer you the little pamphlet of poems which Mr. Kahnweiler has just published and which is called Tric Trac du Ciel, as well as the little volume in the Contemporaries series: Les Douze Chansons. You will then be able to let me know your final opinions of my poems.

  Antonin Artaud

  JACQUES RIVIÈRE TO ANTONIN ARTAUD

  June 23, 1923

  Dear Sir,

  I have read attentively that which you were kind enough to submit to my judgment and it is in all sincerity that I think I can reassure you about the doubts your letter betrays and which I was so touched that you should choose to confide in me. There are in your poems, as I told you first off, awkwardnesses and above all strangenesses that are disconcerting. But they seem to me to correspond to a certain studied effort on your part rather than to a lack of command of your thought. Obviously (this is what prevents me for the moment from publishing any of your poems in the Nouvelle Revue Française) you do not attain in general to a sufficient unity of impression. But I am sufficiently accustomed to reading manuscripts to glimpse that this concentration of your means toward a simple poetic object is not at all ruled out for you by your temperament, and that with a little patience, even if this is to be nothing more than a simple elimination of the divergent images or references, you will succeed in writing perfectly coherent and harmonious poems.

  I shall always be delighted to see you, to talk with you, and to read whatever it pleases you to submit to me. Am I to send back the volume you brought me?

  I beg you, dear sir, to accept the assurance of my most sympathetic feelings.

  Jacques Rivière

  ANTONIN ARTAUD TO JACQUES RIVIÈRE

  Paris, January 29, 1924

  Sir,

  You may rightly have forgotten me. During the course of last May I made you a little mental confession. And I had asked you a question. Will you allow me to complete this confession today, to resume it, to fathom my own depths. I don’t seek to justify myself in your eyes, and it matters little to me whether I seem to exist for anyone at all. I have all the distance which separates me from myself to cure me of the judgment of others. Please do not consider this insolence, but rather the very faithful confession, the painful setting forth of a painful state of thought.

  For a long time I held a grudge against you for your reply. I had given myself to you as a mental case, a veritable psychic anomaly, and you answered me with a literary judgment of poems I didn’t, and couldn’t, care about. I perceive today that I had perhaps not been explicit enough, and for that, pardon me once more.

  I had thought to attract your attention if not by the preciosity of my poems, at least by the rarity of certain phenomena of an intellectual kind, which were precisely the reason why these poems were not, could not be other than they are, even though I had within me precisely what was needed to take them to the furthest extreme of perfection. Vain affirmation: I exaggerate, but purposely.

  My question was in fact specious, perhaps, but it was of you that I asked it, of you and no other, because of the extreme sensibility, the almost unhealthy penetration of your mind. I flattered myself that I was bringing you a case, a characterized mental case, and, curious as I thought you were of every mental deformation, of all destructive obstacles to thought, I meant simultaneously to draw your attention to the real value, the initial value of my thought, and to the productions of my thought.

  This scattered condition of my poems, these formal flaws, this constant giving way of my thought, must be attributed not to a lack of exercise, of possession of the instrument I wielded, of intellectual development, but to a central collapse of the soul, a kind of erosion, essential and at the same time fleeting, of thought; to the temporary nonpossession of the material benefices of my development; to the abnormal separation of the elements of thought (the impulse to think, at each of the terminal stratifications of thought, passing through all the states, all the bifurcations of thought and form).

  There is then something which destroys my thought; a something which does not prevent me from being what I might be, but which leaves me, if I may say so, in suspense. A furtive something which snatches away the words which I found, diminishes my mental tension, destroys gradually the mass of my thought in its substance, deprives me of everything down to the turns of phrase with which one expresses oneself and which translate exactly the most inseparable, localized, existing modulations of thought. I do not insist further. I do not have to describe my state.

  I would like to say only enough to be at last understood and believed by you.

  Then trust me. Admit, I beg of you, the reality of these phenomena, admit their furtiveness, their eternal repetition, admit that I would have written this letter before today if I had not been in this state. And once again here is my question:

  You know the subtlety, the fragility of the mind? Haven’t I told you enough about it to prove to you that I have a mind which literarily exists, as T. exists, or E., or S., or M. Restore to my mind the unity of its forces, the cohesion it lacks, the constancy of its tension, the stability of its own substance. (And objectively all this is so little.) And tell me if what my (early) poems lack might not be all at once restored to them?

  Do you believe that penetration, in a well-constituted mind, goes hand in hand with extreme weakness, and that one can amaze and disappoint at the same time? Finally, although I am a good judge of my mind, I cannot judge the productions of my mind very well, I can judge the productions of my mind only insofar as they are confused with it in a kind of happy unconsciousness. This will be my criterion.

  I send you then, to terminate, I present you with the latest production of my mind. It is worth little relatively to me, though more than nothingness all the same. It is a makeshift. But the question for me is to know if it is better to write this or to write nothing at all.

  You will supply the answer to this in accepting or refusing this little essay. You will judge it, from the viewpoint of the absolute. But I will tell you that it would be a fine consolation for me to think that even though I cannot be all myself, not as high, as dense, as wide as myself, I can still be something. That, sir, is why you must be truly absolute. Judge this prose beyond all questions of tendency, principle, personal taste, judge it with the charity of y
our soul, the essential lucidity of your mind, rethink it with your heart.

  It probably indicates a brain and a soul which exist, to which a certain place is due. In consideration of the palpable irradiation of this soul, do not brush it aside unless your conscience protests with all its forces, but if you have a doubt, let it be resolved in my favor.

  I submit myself to your judgment.

  Antonin Artaud

  POSTSCRIPT OF A LETTER IN WHICH CERTAIN LITERARY PRINCIPLES OF JACQUES RIVIÈRE WERE DISCUSSED:

  You will tell me that another mental cohesion and another penetration would be necessary to give an opinion on questions like these. Well, then! My own weakness and absurdity are to wish to write at any cost, and to express myself.

  I am a man who has suffered much from the mind, and for this reason I have the right to speak. I accepted once and for all to submit to my inferiority. And yet I am not stupid. I know that there might be cause to think further than I think and perhaps otherwise. I myself wait only for my intellect to change, for its upper drawers to open. In an hour and tomorrow perhaps I shall have changed thought, but this present thought exists; I shall not let my thought be lost.

  A. A.

  CRY

  The little celestial poet

  Opens the shutters of his heart.

  The heavens collide. Oblivion

  Uproots the symphony.

  Stableboy the insane house

  That gave you the wolves to guard

  Does not suspect the wrath

  Brewing under the great alcove

  Of the vault which hangs over us.

  Therefore, silence and night,

  Muzzle all impurity

  The sky with great strides

  Proceeds to the crossroads of noise.

  The star eats. The oblique sky

  Opens its flight toward the summits

  Night sweeps away the remains

  Of the meal which contented us.

  On Earth walks a slug

  Whom ten thousand white hands greet

  A slug creeps to the place

  Where Earth disappeared.

  Now angels were returning in peace

  Summoned by no obscenity

  When the real voice arose

  From the mind that summoned them.

  The sun lower than the day

  Turned all the sea to steam.

  A dream strange yet clear

  Was born on the wildly fleeing Earth.

  The little lost poet

  Leaves his celestial position

  With an idea of the place beyond the Earth

  Pressed to the tresses of his heart.

  * * * * *

  Two traditions met.

  But our padlocked thoughts

  Lacked the necessary space,

  An experiment to be rebegun.

  A. A.

  ANTONIN ARTAUD TO JACQUES RIVIÈRE

  March 22, 1924

  My letter was worth at least a reply. Send back, sir, letters and manuscripts.

  I would have liked to find something intelligent to say to you, to mark well what separates us, but it was useless. I am a mind not yet formed, an idiot: Think of me what you will.

  Antonin Artaud

  JACQUES RIVIÈRE TO ANTONIN ARTAUD

  Paris, March 25, 1924

  Dear Sir,

  Why of course, I quite agree with you, your letters deserved a reply; I haven’t yet been able to give it to you; that’s all. Excuse me, I beg you.

  One thing strikes me: the contrast between the extraordinary precision of your diagnosis of yourself and the vagueness, or at least the formlessness of the realizations you attempt.

  I was wrong, no doubt, in my letter of last year, to want to reassure you at any price: I behaved like those doctors who claim to cure their patients by refusing to listen to them, by denying the strangeness of their case, by forcibly replacing them in normality. It is a bad method. I regret it.

  Even if I had no other evidence, your tormented handwriting, staggering, collapsing, as though absorbed here and there by secret maelstroms, would be enough to confirm for me the reality of the phenomena of mental “erosion” of which you complain.

  But how do you escape them so well when you try to define your sickness? Is one to believe that anguish gives you that force and that lucidity which you lack when you yourself are not directly concerned? Or is it the nearness of the object that you strive to seize which suddenly allows you so sure a grip? In any case, you obtain, in the analysis of your own mind, complete and remarkable results, which must give you confidence in that very mind, since it is in any case the very instrument which procures them for you.

  Other considerations may also help you not perhaps to hope for a cure, but at least to bear your illness with patience. They are of a general nature. You speak in one place in your letter of the “fragility of the mind.” It is superabundantly proved by the mental disorders that the psychiatrist studies and catalogues. But they have perhaps not yet demonstrated sufficiently to what extent supposedly normal thought is the product of hazardous mechanisms.

  That the mind exists by itself, that it has a tendency to live on its own substance, that it grows on the character with a kind of egoism and without worrying about keeping it in harmony with the world can no longer, it seems, be contested today. Paul Valéry dramatized in a marvelous way this autonomy in us of the thinking function, in his famous Soirée avec M. Teste. Caught within its own boundaries, the mind is a sort of canker; it propagates, advances constantly in all directions; you yourself note as one of your torments “the impulse to think”; no idea brings it fatigue and satisfaction; even these temporary appeasements which our bodily functions find in exercise are unknown to it. The man who thinks spends himself totally. Romanticism apart, there is no other outlet to pure thinking than death.

  There is a whole literature—I know that it preoccupies you as much as it interests me—which is the product of the immediate and if I may say so the animal functioning of the mind. It has the aspect of a vast field of ruins; the columns which remain standing are held up only by chance. Chance reigns there, in a kind of dismal multiplicity. One may say that it is the exactest and directest expression of that monster which every man carries within him, but usually seeks to enchain in bonds of events and experience.

  But, you will tell me, is it really that which must be called “fragility of the mind”? While I complain of a weakness, you paint me another disease which would come from an excess of force, of a surfeit of power.

  Here now is my thought pursued a little more closely: The mind is fragile in this: that it needs obstacles—adventitious obstacles. Only, it loses itself, destroys itself. It seems to me that this mental “erosion,” these inner thefts, this “destruction” of thought “in its substance” which afflicts your own, have no other cause than the too-great liberty which you allow it. It is the absolute which deranges it. To stretch out, the mind needs a limit and the fortunate opacity of experience blocking its path. The only remedy for madness is the innocence of facts.

  As soon as you accept the mental level, you accept all the troubles, and especially all the laxity of the mind. If by thought one understands creation, as you seem to most of the time, it must at all costs be relative; one will find security, constancy, force only in committing the mind to something.

  I know: There is a kind of intoxication in the instant of its pure emanation, in that moment when its fluid escapes directly from the brain and encounters a quantity of spaces, a quantity of stages and levels in which to unfurl. It is that wholly subjective impression of complete liberty, and even of complete intellectual license, which our “surrealists” have tried to translate by the dogma of a fourth poetical dimension. But the punishment for this soaring is ready and waiting: The universal possible is changed into concrete impossibilities; the captured phantom finds twenty inner phantoms to avenge him which paralyze us, devour our spiritual substance.

  Is this to say that the nor
mal functioning of the mind must consist in a servile imitation of given models and that to think is nothing more than to reproduce? I don’t think so; one must choose what one wants to “render” and have it always be something not only definite, not only recognizable, but also unknown; for the mind to discover all is power, the concrete must assume the function of the mysterious. Every successful “thought,” every language which apprehends, the words by which one afterward recognizes the writer, are always the result of a compromise between a current of intelligence which comes from him, and an ignorance which comes toward him, a surprise, an obstacle. The rightness of an expression always involves a remnant of hypothesis; the word has had to strike against a deaf object, and more promptly than reason would have reached it. But where the object, where the obstacle, is totally lacking, the mind continues, adamant and feeble; and everything disintegrates in an immense contingency.

  I judge you, perhaps, both from too-abstract a viewpoint and from too-personal preoccupations: It seems to me however that your case can be explained in a large measure by the observations I have just permitted myself (at a little too much length) and that it enters into the general pattern I have tried to outline. As long as you let your intellectual force pour out into the absolute, it is tormented by eddies, pierced by impotence, a prey to ravening gusts which disorganize it; but as soon as, brought back by anguish to your own mind, you direct it at that near and enigmatic object, it condenses, intensifies, makes itself useful and penetrating, and brings you positive benefits; that is, truths expressed with all the contrast necessary to render them accessible to others, something then which goes beyond your sufferings, your very existence, which increases your stature and consolidates you, gives you the only reality that man can reasonably hope to conquer with his own forces, the reality in others.

  I am not systematically an optimist; but I refuse to despair of you. My sympathy for you is very great; I was wrong to leave you so long without hearing from me.