Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  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.

  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 bo
urgeois 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.

  The Theater and Its Double would appear fourteen years later in February 1938, just after Artaud returned from a trip to Ireland—in a strait-jacket, to be handed over to the French authorities, thirteen years after Rivière’s death in 1925.

  For now, however, we can only ask if, when, at fifty-two, his looks (and teeth) gone, his demeanor changed from that of a handsome devil to that of an emaciated ghoul, Artaud chose the title for what was to be his last work, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, did he recognize it—did he take the title intentionally—as a posthumous gift from Rivière, who had picked out the phrase “to cure us of the judgment of others” from those early letters and re-presented it to Artaud in Rivière’s own slightly varied context?

  * * *

  In terms of an attitude toward art, in terms of art’s very definition, the organization of its entification inscribed within the discourse of those generations that, since the middle of the nineteenth century, have called themselves modern—in terms of those gut responses all of us are still constantly arguing with as to what is and what is not art—in terms of art’s hidden, inner-dimensional matrix and its external mythical and social moorings, Wagner may well have been the largest influence on Western culture we have yet known. Nor am I talking about a few phrases or paragraphs in his work that can be seen to embody, after the fact, the seeds of future trends. (For that, finally, is much the way Artaud works on us—nor would he, mystic that he was, have had it otherwise.) I am talking about the massive imposition of theatrical practices, supported by the state, coupled with a public fascination so great that, for nearly fifty years after his death, practically any European who aspired to any level of culture had in some way to be molded by the Wagner phenomenon. How intense was this phenomenon? Recall Proust’s Mme. Verdurin, who, still at the turn of the century, would not allow Wagner to be played at her soirées, as the music was too exciting to her nerves. Whether one was for him or against him, the nerves that shivered and quivered under the Wagnerian onslaught were those of the entire European bourgeoisie. Wagner represented the birth of “the modern” in art, not as a fashion, but as a program, a practice, and a philosophy. That is how artists from Baudelaire and Berlioz up through T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce heard him.

  Even with the early nineteen-eighties’ resurgence of interest (1983 marked the centennial of Wagner’s death), it is still hard for many of us to imagine the extent of Wagner’s influence. But we get some inkling of it when we remember that by World War I, the three human beings about whom more books, more monographs, and more articles had been written than any others in history were Jesus Christ, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Richard Wagner.

  IV

  “We have no artists today whose nobility, stature, and greatness of spirit equal that of Lord Byron, George Sand, Richard Wagner . . .”

  Considering herself or himself more or less in touch with the evanescent shifting of late modernist and postmodern aesthetic values, the contemporary listener must smile at such a statement. I resuscitate it here to invoke what we might call today, somewhat clumsily, the establishment aesthetic of the last decades of the Victorian age, when such a sentence (yes, it is part of my fiction) might have been uttered. Certainly this particular galaxy of judgments (which probably would have been momentarily extended to include Victor Hugo and, as it turned to England, would have looked with almost equal favor on Edward FitzGerald’s Rubá’iyát and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and would have turned expectantly to Swinburne well before Yeats) becomes rarer and rarer through the Edwardian coda to the nineteenth century until, by Edward VII’s actual death in 1910 (when, wrote Virginia Woolf, human nature changed), such pronouncements either cease or at least come to take on some of the connotations of a certain mental fossilization that this value matrix, once so quintessentially European, has for us today.

  For us, that thirty years from 1880 to 1910 is a rather bleak period in, say, English poetry. Yeats and Hardy are its high points. The first of these decades includes some of Hopkins’s working period, but that work will not be discovered until later. Rudyard Kipling, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Bridges, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson—and A. E. Housman was read so ubiquitously, of course, as to make him a kind of misanthropic Rod McKuen of minuscule output—do not mark out for most a major poetic epoch.

  Yeats aside, whatever one’s personal enthusiasms for the English poets of this period, one has the feeling that they are just that: personal. And this is, of course, the period to which my reconstructed pronouncement belongs, even more so than it belongs to the years contemporaneous with the artists it evokes.

  “The nineteenth century,” as Auden tells us, “is the European century. Insofar as neither England nor America is part of Europe . . . [they] can be called provincial.” And it is the provincials’ justly-awed view of Europe, a view that took a while to filter down and become commonplace, that our “Bryon/Sand/Wagner” pronouncement reflects. Europe herself was busy during this same time inventing the avant-garde. But that had not yet come across the various waters.

  What kind of world was it for, say, an Englishman concerned with art? For one thing—and it is perhaps the most surprising thing for us today—during this period there was no course in any English university called “English Literature.”

  The populations of the industrial nations, like England, were rising—doubling, tripling, quadrupling. Religion simply could not constrain the actions of the swollen urban laboring class in the way it had served as a sanctioned set of guiding superstitions for a rural peasantry.

  Try to imagine a great city without written signs!

  A minimum level of literacy is an urban necessity for maintaining minimal order. Add to that the necessary socialization that schools provide in that most anti-social construct, the big city, and we begin to understand the necessary rise in public education that accompanied the rise in urban populations.

  Walter Benjamin notes in his work on nineteenth-century Paris that, with the new size of cities and the advent of public transportation necessary to get about in them, for the first time in history a sizable number of people were now spending comparatively long periods of time every day in horse-drawn trolleys and rattling trains, sitting across from and surreptitiously looking at people they did not know and to whom they were not going to speak. From this new, unnatural, and (at first) wholly urban experience, Benjamin speculated, the whole air of social mystery and the resultant hunger for social analysis grew up that was answered first by a now-long-vanished genre of writing called “physiologies.” These were collections of literary sketches—not quite short stories, not quite essays—that simply described or analyzed the various types you might see moving about in the city. They were extraordinarily popular in the mid-years of
the nineteenth century, until the novel, under the pressure of Thackeray, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and Wilkie Collins, adjusted its great and generous chambers to include an equal range of character types in even more interesting and mysterious interplay—thus satisfying that hunger even more (and making obsolete the physiologies). The urban crowd itself became a kind of mythic phenomenon, hiding within it mystery, crime, romance, desire . . . Again and again in those nineteenth-century novels, menacing or desirable (or simply ambiguous) characters emerge from it, or turn to become lost in it.

  The crowd of strangers was a wall of mystery. News from its far side was available only through the papers, which reported from a world of melodrama, where upstanding fathers and husbands could be beset by calamities, so that in a single year’s time they would turn into drunkards, thieves, murderers, rapists or suicides; where chaste and filial maidens could be disappointed in love so that they fell into a swoon or bad company or prostitution or tuberculosis or death overnight; or where the most dissolute and depraved of criminals might be touched by grace, whereupon they would be transformed, in a moment, into bona fide saints (if only one could get those transitions right between those autonomous/malleable subject states)—whereas on our side, the evil were stigmatized before their births by the misdeeds of their families and the good were equally well-marked; where nothing ever happened and transition itself was impossible, save that purely economic shift in monetary status—up or down—that always presupposed some violent bodily wrenching away from the endlessly stagnant social reality to begin it.

  But that’s because the relentlessly repeated experience of a crowd of strangers was itself historically new, and had to be imaginatively explored—a crowd that the other giant of nineteenth-century opera, Verdi, gave voice to again and again in his works, and that Wagner felt—hopelessly, desperately, stridently—should be only his audience and given as little voice as possible in his music dramas, which were, after all, relentlessly about the individual, the heroic, the will.