Artaud performed the recording’s closing text. He cuts across his own voice, assuming the interrupting voice of his spectators as they yell for him to be placed back in a straitjacket. Artaud’s own voice obstinately breaks through, with a final imagery of the reconstruction of the human body on an autopsy table: Artaud’s act of radical anatomy will excise “god” and the body’s organs, ultimately instigating a delirious, wrong-way-round dance of disciplined will to be undertaken by that human body.
In the days before the anticipated transmission of his recording on 2 February 1948, Artaud asserted that it would work to attack and jolt the people of Paris, but would also bring to them deliverance and “corporeal glory”[6]. He especially wanted the recording to impact upon and provoke those engaged in hard, poorly-salaried manual work, such as metalworkers and road-menders. But then, the day before its expected transmission, the recording was banned as inflammatory and obscene by the head of the radio station. “It was banned just as though it were a porno movie,” as Paule Thévenin said.[7] On the evening of 2 February, with supreme irony, Parisian listeners to the radio heard a broadcast about how the city’s inhabitants needed, in the era of the Marshall Plan, to be aware of American popular culture and to adapt their lives to it. Despite newspaper scandals and private auditions of Artaud’s recording – at which writers such as Jean Cocteau and Paul Éluard declared that it should be transmitted – the ban stayed in place. With the exception of a handful of clandestine copies, such as those belonging to Paule Thévenin (who retained a copy of the unedited material) and Roger Blin, the recording disappeared for forty years. Artaud was enraged at the censorship, which he perceived as being essentially linked to representation itself as allied processes of social sabotage, and wrote that “wherever the machine is/there is always the abyss, nothingness.”[8] Now, after this last disaster, he declared that he would create what he called “a theatre of blood”[9] with terminal violence. Just over one month after the ban on his work, and ill with intestinal cancer, he died on 4 March in his pavilion at Ivry-sur-Seine, having taken an overdose of chloral hydrate.
The scream is the core of Artaud’s recording: it emerges from, projects, and visualizes the body. In the space of the recording, the interaction between Artaud’s scream and the silences which surround it work to generate a volatile and tactile material of sound, image and absence. Artaud placed and juxtaposed the elements of the work with extreme attention – everything, he wrote, was arranged “at a hairsbreadth/in a fulminating order”.[10] The multiple eruptions and intersections at work in Artaud’s language tear apart all residues of narrative and temporal flow, constructing a framework for the body which exists on multiple spatial levels. Voices emerge from behind voices in dense trajectories of sound which move and act in an infinite number of directions. It is within this projection of a language executed in a swarm of screams, words and chance elements – in an overwhelming rush and beating of sound – that Artaud creates an explicit awareness of his own return from the silence and physical incapacitation of his incarceration of nine years in the asylums of France. The intention of that return of Artaud’s language with the body is to collide sensationally with the structures of the French language – and with the nature of language itself – so irreparably fracturing and forcibly reinventing them.
The power of laughter to negate and refuse is deeply involved in Artaud’s language. Laughter works as both an explosive attack and as a corrosive taunting. Artaud’s outraged derision in his recording for the badly-formed and cowardly human body compounds the ridicule he aims at the ludicrous definition of irrecoverable insanity which had been imposed upon him by a succession of psychiatrists, from Jacques Lacan to Gaston Ferdière. On another level, Artaud’s laughter is a violent probing of signification, exploring and digging into the repeatable, assimilable face of language, and cancelling it out.
This anatomy of language reveals the disunified, multiplicitous body in language which Artaud puts in the place of what he views as the social language of representation, with its malicious urge to fix and to define. Artaud’s language breaks out in irrationally pulsing movements; it transforms, contradicts and destroys whatever it encounters. But Artaud’s laughter is intentional as well as wild; however convulsively out-of-control it may seem to go, it always remains absolutely at the service of Artaud’s struggle for the human body. His work, he declares, “isn’t the symbol of an absent void,/of an appalling incapacity for man to realize himself in life./It is the affirmation/of a terrible/and moreover inescapable necessity.”[11]
The perpetual focus of that sense of necessity is the body. Artaud’s work positively concerns little else. It is his obsession. The aim of his recording is to erase all of its own temporal gaps and voids, in order for the body it evokes to be transmitted immediately and physically. Alongside Artaud’s screams and his dense, controlled words, only silences can survive in this language, so that the body can breathe them.
Language starts with the body and hits back against the body; in order for it to become infinite, the body’s action must bypass the mental processes which Artaud despises. He writes: “The act I’m talking about aims for the true organic and physical transformation of the human body.”[12] In order to validate an existence for the body, Artaud must reduce language and reduce corporeal matter to an extreme essence.
Everything extraneous to the body is refused – all nature and all culture – so that the body is by itself, sharpened, bone and nerve, without family, “god” or internal organs. It can also move before itself in space, in order to create and generate itself. It is unprecedented and has no progenitor. Artaud’s language in To Have Done With The Judgement Of God is reduced and pared: it is burnt into the body, to express this need for physical self-responsibility. Everything in the recording must emerge into auditory space at once, and this entails an intense and aggressive process of reduction which strongly recalls the demands of Artaud’s film writings for an absolute density in the image. And as with his polemics for a new kind of cinema, Artaud’s recorded work exacts a magnetic, inescapable welding of itself with its spectator. In his recording, Artaud sets out a physical act for his spectators which will radically transform the human body (and, by implication, the spectators’ own bodies); but, through its participation in this upheaval, the body will have created for itself a unique will. Similarly, Artaud’s language itself is fragmented, but its screaming desire for physical transmission sutures the pieces back together again in the spectators’ bodies, where they can transform themselves.
In his pavilion at Ivry-sur-Seine, Artaud worked to generate an open-ended, violent language which involved the production of dancing, fighting, incanting, hacking with a hammer at a huge block of wood, writing, drawing: all of these connecting elements being conducted and explored to the point of exhaustion. The scream is what is forced out of all of these elements together, at once; it is simultaneously soldered out of diverse materials and made to burst out into the atmosphere. Its components collapse together to propel it. The infinity of the body is in the voice. All of the areas of the body used in Artaud’s work – especially the hand and the vocal tract – are concentrated and splintered up into the scream. Then the voice attacks, acts back on what Artaud sees as the betraying organs of the body. The scream is a very dark area, far away from normal or everyday language, but as Artaud emphasized in 1947: “All true language is incomprehensible.”[13]
The dancing body was always a strong image for Artaud in his work. The last words of his recording evoke the dancing bodies of young Parisians engaged in an erotic frenzy in the popular dance-halls of the time. His own scream is itself an exploratory dancing of the extremities of the body. Artaud wrote extensively about dance in his final months, emphasizing a dance of furious revolt which could be brought into existence in order to detonate “the misery of the human body”.[14] Dance, for Artaud, can negate “god”. And dance is also the point of origin for a transformation of the human body, through a violent b
ut self-controlled exploration of itself and its potential exposure to elements of chance and external attack. Dance is how the body patrols, tests and defends itself from obliteration: so, the body engaged in this act must by essence be distorted, painful and alert – as well as in ecstasy at its own movements and gestures. As Tatsumi Hijikata – the Japanese inventor of the seminal “Butoh” dance performance art of the 1960s, and the only artist ever to have advanced Artaud’s work – understood, the scream is the end point of dance; the scream exerts an exactly choreographed image of the body with all its extremes of sensation.[15]
The scream is a compulsive act of falling, inducing a moment at which the awareness of the body’s necessity is made to develop. As far back as the mid-1930s, Artaud had written: “I fall./I fall but I am not afraid./I bring up my fear in the noise of rage…/to scream I must fall./I fall into an underworld and I cannot get out, I can never get out…/This scream I’ve thrown out is a dream./But a dream which eats the dream.”[16] The scream spills out over whatever defines it, to become dangerous. And finally, the scream is Artaud’s dense language – the tearing apart of meaning and representation, and the only way to project his authentic body.
In Artaud’s work, the scream is made a visual, physical substance in space. The human fascination with visualizing and materializing the scream – as both a primary obsession and an artistic preoccupation – is so compelling as to be without an origin, unless the very process of making images of the human body can be assigned an origin. In the first known cave paintings of the human figure, the face cries in triumph or pain; in the first icons of the figure of Christ being crucified, the mouth opens in torment or ecstasy. The pre-eminent images of the scream, for contemporary art, are those painted by Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1895, and by Francis Bacon in the late 1940s. For Munch, in The Scream, the scream was an image that encompassed the essential substance of human experience, in its reaction to a natural world whose spectacular transformation from sky into blood, over the city of Oslo at sunset, transmits hostility and the imminence of death to its horrified witness. Munch’s image of the scream is the border, to be approached with trepidation, between malevolent nature and human madness, anguish and death.
Notably, Munch was intensely preoccupied with juxtaposing his image of the scream with language, in the form of a fragmentary text that caught and allied itself to the same experience; over many years, he produced numerous versions of this text, one variant of which reads: “I walked along the road with two friends – and the sun went downThe sky suddenly became blood – and I felt/as if a breath of sadness/I stopped – leaned against the railing/tired to death/Over the blue-black fjord and city lay clouds of dripping/steaming blood/My friends walked on and I was left in/fear with an open wound in my breast./a great scream went through nature”.[17]
Francis Bacon painted the human scream in around the same years that Artaud was executing his own scream, in particular with his Figure Study II of 1945–1946 and his sequence of screaming figures from the late 1940s inspired by Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. At that time, Bacon’s imageries of the human scream were thought of as responses – involuntary or intentional – to the warfare of the preceding years and its concentration camps, mass exterminations and revelation of potential nuclear annihilation. But Bacon’s avowed intention, made clear in his interviews with David Sylvester, was to create the most beautiful image of the scream, with glorious bursts of colour to catch the living flesh and the movement of the mouth. In this aim, he explicitly distanced himself from Munch’s exploration of human experience.
Bacon said: “You could say that the scream is a horrific image; in fact, I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror. I think, if I had really thought about what causes somebody to scream, it would have made the scream that I tried to paint more successful. Because I should in a sense have been more conscious of the horror that produced the scream.”[18] Bacon considered that he had failed in his work on the scream; significantly, he believed that it was a black-and-white image from a film, rather than a painting or drawing, that visually conveyed the scream with the sensorial exactitude and splendour that he desired. This was a still from the Odessa steps sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin, in which a woman’s face is seen full-on, the eyes staring (one of them penetrated by a bullet which has sent her spectacles awry and shattered one lens), the mouth strained at its extreme limits, a gestural streak of blood traversing the face vertically. In John Maybury’s 1998 film about the obsessions of Francis Bacon, Love Is The Devil, an ejaculatory stream of vivid scarlet blood propelled from a boxing-match punch spatters across the ecstatic face of the watching Francis Bacon in an exact visual counterpart to Eisenstein’s image of the Odessa woman. For Bacon, it was film – or the condensation of all film imageries into one unique still image – that visually seized the scream. He commented: “I did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry. I was not able to do it and it’s much better in the Eisenstein and there it is.”[19]
Where Munch and Bacon painted the scream, and Eisenstein filmed it, Artaud’s work is uniquely the scream itself: the visceral and visual transmission of the body: breath, blood, saliva, sperm, bone. All of Artaud’s visual work is a wild but disciplined concoction of images, languages and screams. At a late stage in this work, Artaud had given emphasis to the invented language of his glossolalia as embodying the point of intersection between these three elements. The glossolalia, as an incantation of invented words and sounds, were developed sonically, as a testing of the body’s capacities, and were then transferred to the surface of the page or drawing, poised between a textual language and a visual arrangement. Artaud placed the dense lines of his glossolalia figuratively in the centre of the page’s surface (insisting that, in their printed form, they should be further emphasized visually through being printed in bold characters), or else at a highlighted point of his drawing’s surface space.
To the end of his work, Artaud was preoccupied with creating a visual language which, at their diverse stages, his film projects and his drawings embody. Artaud’s drawings, especially, are an interrogation of the surface – the paper which he assaulted, sliced and burned – and its potential to hold and show the gestures and existence of the body. But, at the extreme point of his work, the use of a surface is abandoned, and his visual work – the scream, that, for Artaud, carries the body and negates its representation – is projected directly onto and into space, endlessly.
Artaud’s screaming body is the violent revelation of all the raw extremities of existence.
NOTES
All of Artaud’s recorded work – with the exception of a small number of “out-takes” from To Have Done With The Judgement Of God – is available in the form of a boxed set of compact discs issued by André Dimanche Éditeur, Marseilles, in 1995. A single compact disc of To Have Done With The Judgement Of God was also issued in 1995 by Sub Rosa Aural Documents, Brussels. The whole of the text of To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, together with Artaud’s working notes and letters about the recording, appears in French (as Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu) in the Gallimard edition of the Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XIII (Paris, 1974). An excellent translation by Clayton Eshleman of all of the text of To Have Done With The Judgement Of God appears in his collection of Artaud translations entitled Watchfiends And Rack Screams: Works From The Final Period (published by Exact Change Press, Boston USA, 1995). Eshleman, who devoted many years to his translations, is the only translator to have created an accurate English-language counterpart for Artaud’s language; virtually all other volumes of translations of Artaud’s work are erroneous and should be avoided like the plague.
(1) Roger Blin (1907–1984) was, at the time, a film and theatre actor (and former left-wing political activist) who was in the process of making the transition to becoming a prominent theatre director; a close friend of Artaud’s since the late 1920s, he would go on to direct vastly influential firs
t productions of works by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Maria Casarès (1922–1996) was, by this time, already renowned as one of the outstanding actresses of her generation, having worked with film directors such as Robert Bresson and Marcel Carné, as well as in the theatre; she would appear, two years later, as the “Princess of Death” in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée. Paule Thévenin (1922–1993) was a former medical student who was then working, unpaid, as Artaud’s assistant.
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