Artaud and painting: the quest for a language of gnosis

Author(s): JANE GOODALL

Source: Paragraph , JULY 1989, Vol. 12, No. 2 (JULY 1989), pp. 107-123
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43151687

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Artaud and painting: the quest for a
language of gnosis

'La Bouillabaisse des formes dans la tour de Babel'1 is the title of a drawing
Artaud made at Rodez in 1946. The formes are crudely drafted cylinders,
cubes, rectangles, variously articulated with each other or with half realized
human forms which seem to be in the process of either escaping from or
being captured within the rigidity of the surging geometric modules. Babel
as the chora of languages is being equated with the Timaean chora of forms.
The Gnostic travesties of Plato anathematized by Plotinus are restyled
'parodie misprision' by Harold Bloom.2 In Gnostic mythologies, material
creation is the manifestation of the fall, the aberrant consequence of a split in
the Godhead ( as in V alentinian systems ) of of a conflict between the powers
of light and the powers of darkness which can only be terminated by the
deadlock of their forces in form (as in Manichean systems). Almost all
Gnostic mythologies share the idea that matter ( byle ) serves as a dungeon
for the spark of light ( pneuma ) which is the vestige of divinity in man. The
chora is a cauldron of abominations, in which the process of becoming is
supervised by a tyrannical Demiurge as his means of securing permanent
control over the dispersed fragments of pneuma. Corporeal beings are thus
abducted spiritual beings, deluded by their physical surroundings into for-
getting their real status as 'aliens', exiles from a supramundane real (the
pleroma) which is formless and infinite. The concept of the imprisoned
pneuma is elaborated into a drama of conspiracy and control, for the agents
of the Demiurge ( archons ) work to preserve the dormant or deluded state of
human consciousness which, as Hans Jonas explains, is 'a positive counter-
condition to that of knowledge, actively induced ... to prevent it'.3
Anamnesis, the discovery of the alterity of the real, is a cataclysmic event in
the human psyche with macrocosmic implications. Some Gnostic allegories
attempt to account for the a-gnostic state of human consciousness by repre-
senting the fall as the fall of a divine thought (Ennioa) into a sphere of
opacity in which it loses sight of its origin in Nous , the divine consciousness.
And so in the semiotic chora,4 Ennoia devolves towards its hypostasis in the
prisonhouse of language.
The bid to escape from this is thus integrally bound up with Artaud's
Blakean project to 'rendre infini les frontières de ce qu'on appelle la
réalité'5 (convert into infinity the frontiers of what is called reality). His
apocalyptic denunciations of the logocentric theatre are fuelled by the

Paragraph Volume 12 © Oxford University Press 1989

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108 Paragraph
prophetic conviction that faith in words amounts to complicity with the
powers which hold humanity in thrall. His notes for the Preface to Le
Théâtre et son Double make the ratio quite explicit:

Echappatoire de la pensée, en eux se ramasse tout notre réel ... le Verbe donne la
mesure de notre impuissance, notre séparation du réel (p. zīļ).6 (Escape of the
thought, in this is recollected all our reality . . . the Word shows the degree of our
impotence, our divorce from the real.)

His plan to break the stranglehold of le Verbe by creating an alchemical

synthesis of the distinct languages of music, gesture and pictorial
composition was inspired by a performance given by the Balinese Dance
Theatre in 1 93 1 . This convinced him that the theatre was the crucible in
which a quintessential language could be distilled, but in spite of his
consistently asserted commitment to the principle of synthesis, a fascina-
tion with the language of the painter is predominant throughout the var-
ious stages of his quest for a form of expression capable of transmitting the
soteriological impact of pure or gnostic thought.
The performers of the Balinese Dance Theatre created an 'architecture
spirituelle' with stage figures evoking 'de grands insectes, pleins de lignes
et de segments faits pour les relier à l'on ne sait quelle perspective de la
nature dont ils n'apparaissent plus qu'une géométrie detachée'7 (huge
insects, filled with lines and segments drawn to relate them to who knows
what pespective in nature, of which they appear purely a detached
geometric figuration). There is a correlation between this potent vision
and that which Paolo Uccello (one of Artaud's early alter-egos) tragically
failed to realize. Uccello was the subject of a drame mental which Artaud
wrote in the mid 1 920s, and which was based on an account of the painter
in Marcel Schwob's Vies Imaginaires. According to Schwöb, Uccello
succumbed to a fanatical determination to discover the secret of the
universe through absolute mastery of the principles of geometry, a deter-
mination which led him into an existence of hermetic solitude
compounded by an extreme mental isolation. His work became so
abstruse as to be incomprehensible even to his technically pioneering
associates, Brunelleschi and Donatello; the beautiful girl he married was
gradually dying of starvation in his spider-infested house, whilst he
continued to record the linear paradigms of her face and figure in
countless drawings. The masterwork still clutched in his hand when he
himself was found dead was a small round of parchment covered with a
mass of intersecting and concentric sweeps of the compass.
Where Schwob's Uccello turned physical beings into a plethora of

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 Artaud and painting 1 09
abstract schema, Artaud's 'Paul les Oiseaux' is himself asomatic and his
besetting problem is that of how to create a point of observation from
which to study himself without being constituted at and by such a point.
He can only make himself other by creating his own mythologized double:
'Et donc il se bâtit son histoire, et peu à peu il se détache de lui.'8 (And so
he constructs his history, and little by little detaches himself from himself.)
But this engages him in a further perplexity, for how is he to determine
whether his wife Selvaggia is a new angle in the diagram of the self which
he has devised, or whether she is an independent being imposed upon the
pattern of his life by some extraneous designing agency? The resolution of
this question is bound up with the now paradoxical phenomenon of her
death: only the embodied can die of hunger. Artaud's scenario is thus a
Magrittean enigma in which physical reality and conceptual representa-
tion are seamlessly but impossibly co-ordinated. The gestalt becomes a
mise en abyme when he adds a further dimension by projecting Antonin
Artaud into the drama as its ulterior architect and claims its doubled
protagonist as his own emanation.
A revised version of 'Paul les Oiseaux' was published in L'Ombilic des
limbes ( 1 925 ), which includes in its prefatory declaration:

Je ne conçois pas d'oeuvre comme détachée de la vie. Je n'aime pas la création

détachée. Je ne conçois pas non plus l'esprit comme détaché de lui-même.9
(I do not conceive of the work as disconnected from life. I do not like
disconnected creations. Nor do I conceive of the spirit as disconnected from
itself.)

His own aim is to write a book 'qui dérange les hommes, qui soit comme
une porte ouverte et qui les mène où ils n'auraient jamais consenti à aller,
une porte simplement abouchée avec la réalité' (OL, p. 50) (which
disturbs men, which is to be like an open door and which leads them to
where they would never have gone by consent, a door which simply opens
on to reality). Whilst he parodies the artist in himself who risks making
mere occult diagrams in his attempts to access the real, Artaud cannot
dissociate himself from the ambition which brings Uccello into the
labyrinth of pure geometry, for the real is elsewhere and a language which
may provide entry to it is yet to be found.
When read in the context of L'Ombilic des limbes , however, 'Paul les
Oiseaux' is offset a few pages later by Artaud's description of a work by
his contemporary André Masson, who can create 'un espace idéal, absolu'
(a space which is ideal, absolute) but who yet has 'un pied dans le monde'
(OL, pp. 60-1 ) (one foot in the world). Describing this work, he says, has

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110 Paragraph
brought him to tears. Artaud does not acknowledge the paradox his
extraordinary essay demonstrates: that it is the process of verbal transposi-
tion which releases for him the emotional power of the images in the paint-
ing. Masson's 'Homme' centres upon a human torso which is surrounded
by a constellation of disparate images: a sun, a burst pomegranate (one of
Masson's signature images), a bird, a fluorescent spiral; eggs in cellular
compartments. Metaphor is taken to the point of metamorphosis as each
image blends into that of its formal analogue. The pomegranate is the knee
of the torso and emits 'tongues of flame' which are also the veins of the
abdomen; the arch of the eyebrow becomes the wing of the bird; the sun
glares out from the tableau in place of the effaced eyes. Artaud's text
explores the formal and dynamic intersections of Masson's painting with an
intensified consciousness of the generative violence which seems to link it
with the elemental forces of the macrocosm:

L'air est plein de coups de crayon, des coups de crayon comme des coups de
couteau, comme des stries d'ongle magique. (OL, p. 61)
(The air is filled with strokes of crayon, strokes of the crayon like the strokes of a
knife, like the scorings of a magic nail.)

In describing the work, he describes the dramatic event of a perceptual

encounter between its creator and its observer, an encounter which begins
with a dislocation of all conventional structures of comprehension and
moves the seeing mind towards an elsewhere which is also its point of
origin: 'J'y remonte comme à ma source, j'y sens la place et la disposition
de mon esprit' (OL, p. 62) (I climb there as to my source. I sense there the
place and condition of my spirit.) Although there is no suggestion that this
experience is gnosis in its revelatory and revolutionary sense, it neverthe-
less displays the gnostic conviction that true perception only begins when
the site of consciousness has undergone a traumatic displacement which is
also an anamnesis.
Through the 1920s, Artaud returned with growing persistence and
cogency to an attempt to define the nature of this displacement and the
means by which it might be achieved. Some remarks on Cubism written in
1 921 show a discrimination which is psychologically acute but which
would not distinguish him from fashionable aesthetic theorists of the time.
He is interested in the Cubists' endeavour to divorce sensory and intel-
lectual modes of perception, but cannot envisage how this is to be done
without the basis of some conventionally established system of representa-
tion which will necessarily set constraining parameters. Problematizing
the real does not in itself lead to gnostic metanoia.

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 A rtaud and painting 111

But towards the end of the decade, in a Preface written for a book of
etchings by his friend Jean de Bosschère, Artaud has come to see loss of
sensory and conceptual orientation as part of an alchemical operation
which recreates through dissolution:

De cette sorte de scission essentielle date pour moi, et comme de juste, une
profonde compréhension.10
(From this kind of essential schism there issues for me, as by necessity, a
profound comprehension.)

Anything which inhibits this process, even in its negative cycle, is subject
to scathing denunciation. De Bosschère himself is not spared: he is guilty
of an excessive concern for coherence which betrays the residual power of
an oeuvre capable of severing all connections that prevent the perceptual
revolution of metanosis. In Le Théâtre et son Double the equation of this
turning away from all known and accepted paths of understanding with
turning towards a new reality unbounded by the constraints of rational-
ism is asserted with oracular conviction, as is the paramount importance
of the artist's role in precipitating the transition:

L'Art n'est pas l'imitation de la vie, mais la vie est l'imitation d'un principe
transcendant avec lequel l'art nous remet en communication.11
(Art is not the imitation of life, but life is the imitation of a transcendant principle
with which art can renew our communication.)

This 'dislocated metaphysical situation' (as Jonas terms it) of the

gnostic is not to be resolved by the naive impulse to 'turn round' which has
such disastrous consequences for Lot's wife, the figure whose occluded
presence hovers in the subtext of 'La Mise en scène et la Métaphysique'.
This essay, chronological successor to 'Le Théâtre Balinais', testifies to
Artaud's habitual tendency to revert from theatre to painting in his quest
for examples of gnostic drama. The painting in question is 'Loth et ses filles'
(mistranscribed by Artaud as 'les Filles de Loth'), then attributed to Lucas
van Leyden but now labelled only Ecole d'Anvers ou Ley de. . It demon-
strates what the theatre could become 's'il savait parler le langage qui lui
appartient'12 (if it knew the language which belongs to it). Its sophisticated
binary structure testifies to a deeply ironic insight on the part of the painter.
The perpendicular silhouette of a spindly foreground tree makes a tenuous
demarcation line dissembling the trenchancy of the conceptual division it
enables, which implies an uncanny Freudian awareness of the protective
separation between the seat of consciousness and the potentially over-
whelming energies of the libido. That is what intrigues Artaud.

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112 Paragraph

Anonymous artist of Antwerp or Leiden, Lot and his daughters , Louvre;

copyright Musées Nationaux.

On the right side of the painting, a meteoric outburst in the sky sends
fire and brimstone hurtling down onto Sodom. Towers explode in flames,
other buildings crumble and the whole promontory on which the city is
built is collapsing into the swelling sea where ships are cracked in two. A
winding plank bridge which crosses the gulf supports the poised
silhouettes of four human figures and a donkey, backlit with the lurid glow
of fire like 'ideas in Plato's cave', diminished images filtering through to
the preconscious from the tumultuous recesses of the psyche. In the
foreground area on the left a small group of human subjcts attract the eye
by virtue of a glowing red backdrop which is their tent, but where the
painter portrays nothing but bland domesticity in their attitudes, Artaud

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 A rtaud and painting 113

attributes to them a much more demonstrative acknowledgement of

incestuous tensions, perhaps because he wants to accentuate the ironic
parallel between the inter-personal dynamics and the elemental dynamics of
the drama in the background. Lot 'semble mis là pour profiter de ses filles
abusivement' (MM, p. 35) (seems placed there in order to take perverse
advantage of his daughters) whilst they parade themselves 'comme si elles
n'avaient jamais eu d'autre but que de charmer leur père, de lui servir de
jouet ou d'instrument' (p. 33) (as though they never had any other purpose
than to charm their father, to serve as his plaything or instrument). In these
attitudes, they obey the same mysterious compulsions as the forms of the
landscape:

... il n'est pas possible de mieux exprimer cette soumission des aspects divers du
paysage, au feu manifesté dans le ciel, qu'en disant que bien qu'ils possèdent leur
lumière propre, ils demeurent malgré tout en relation avec lui comme de sortes
d'échos ralentis, comme de vivants points de repère nés de lui et placés là pour lui
permettre d'exercer toute sa force de destruction, (pp. 33-4)
(. . . it isn't possible to explain better this submission by the various aspects of the
landscape to the fire revealed in the sky than by saying that regardless of every-
thing they remain in relationship with it like delayed echoes, like living points of
reference born of it and situated there to enable the exercise of its full destructive
force.)

It is the hermeneutic genius manifested in 'Loth et ses Filles' which first

and foremost excites Artaud's admiration, and which he cannot refrain
from elaborating.
The work displays analogical thinking of an order quite other than that
demonstrated in Masson's 'Homme'. Instead of the formal analogues
which challenge difference on the plane of sensory perception, this painter
seems to draw between the psyche and the physical world analogies which
undermine subjective rather than objective orientation. The use of spatial
divisions to highlight correspondences between one area and another puts
the observer in a position to assess the perceptual limitations of the figures
within the painting and, by implication, his own as a dweller in Plato's
cave. Physical distance does not preclude physical conjunction, though the
eye of the body belies this paradox. The winding road which bridges the
sea and climbs the towering phallic promontory behind Lot's tent is the
sole and fragile contiguous link between the distinct areas of the land-
scape, which are essentially correlated as targets of 'le bombardement noc-
turne des étoiles, des fusées, des bombes solaires' (p. 33) (the nocturnal
volley of stars, rockets, fireworks). They are only visible at all because they
are reached by the light of the celestial explosion which, in Artaud's

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114 Paragraph
commentary, is represented as a motivated force, 'dont nul ne niera
l'impression d'intelligence et de méchanceté qui s'en dégage' (p. 34) (of
which no one will deny the emerging sense of intelligence and malice). He
suggests, moreover, that the underlying motif of the composition is the
interweaving of violent, designing energies with the insouciant forms
which may be possessed or destroyed by them.
All this amounts to a covertly heretical reading of the bible story, whether
or not it is more on Artaud's part than on that of the painter to whom he
attributes such a sophisticated coalescence of Freudian and Platonic ideas.
The mendacious diachrony of the narrative which ensures Lot's dissocia-
tion from the libidinal ferment of Sodom and thus from the retributive
destruction visited upon it is subverted by synchronic spatial organisation.
As the incestuous scene between Lot and his daughters becomes simul-
taneous with the raining of fire and brimstone from the heavens, a correla-
tion is implied which blasphemously contravenes the logic of events as
recounted in Genesis. The avenging force of the deity accordingly becomes
an objective correlative of the internally situated furies of the id, instead of
being set in righteous opposition to them. Many of the gnostic mythologies
identified the nefarious Demiurge with Jehova, the God of fire, and made
villains of the Old Testament heroes who were his minions.
This passage strongly implies the image of the chora :

Il y a encore une idée sur le Devenir que les divers détails du paysage et la façon
dont ils sont peints, dont leurs plans s'annihilent ou se correspondent, nous intro-
duisent dans l'esprit absolument comme une musique le ferait.
Il y en a une autre sur la Fatalité, exprimée moins par l'apparition de ce feu
brusque, que par la façon solennelle dont toutes les formes s'organisent ou se
désorganisent au-dessous de lui. (p. 35)
(There is an idea about Becoming which the various details of the landscape,
the manner in which they're painted with their planes set in correlation or
obliterating each other communicates to the mind in just the way that music
communicates.
There is another idea about Fatality, suggested less by that sudden apparition
of fire than by the solemnity with which all the forms arrange and disarrange
themselves beneath it.)

Artaud's discussion of 'Loth et ses filles' is the paradigmatic introduc-

tion to a wider exploration of the analogy between the becoming of forms
as depicted in the painting and the becoming of signs in the theatre, and
here he builds on the analogy already drawn between the blind subser-
vience of Lot's daughters as targets of their progenitor's lust, and the
incognizant submission of forms in the landscape to the consuming

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 A rtaud and painting 115

drives of their generative source. The words 'obéissant' and 'anarchique'

are leitmotifs set in counterpoint throughout the essay and are respectively
linked with the Platonic antitheses of necessity and design. The forms in
the painting are 'obéissant à une harmonie intellectuelle puissante'
(obedient to a powerful intellectual harmony), whilst as signs they amount
to a language 'suprêmement matérielle et anarchique' (p. 35) (supremely
anarchic and tangible). If signs like forms are blindly obedient, then the
artist's agon is not with signs in themselves, but with the rival designing
agent which produces and controls them. To be caught within the word or
form as finite state is to submit to coercion by the drives of an extraneous
will. To be autonomously 'actif' is to arrogate oneself to the role of
counter-Demiurge,13 by reversing the operations of the chora towards a
new chaos:

On comprend par là que la poésie est anarchique dans le mesure où elle remet en
cause toutes les relations d'objet à objet et des formes avec leurs significations.
Elle est anarchique aussi dans la mesure où son apparition est la conséquence
d'un désordre qui nous rapproche de chaos, (p. 41)
(It is to be understood by this that poetry is anarchic to the extent that it throws
back into question all the relations of object to object or of form to signification.
It is anarchic too to the extent that its advent is the outcome of a disorder which
draws us nearer to chaos.)

Such teleological anarchy should never be mistaken for nihilism. The

'monde gelé' which has been created in the chora of flux, evolution and
becoming is to be thrown into the crucible of dissolution, transmutation
and resurrection. The essay which chronologically follows 'La Mise en
scène et la métaphysique' is 'Le Théâtre alchimique'.
Critics of Artaud's work tend to divide into those like Françoise
Bonardel and Umberto Artioli who take seriously his alchemical logic,
and those concerned with applying the logics and antilogies of post-
structuralist discourse, for whom such cabbalism goes against the grain.
Although Derrida's recent study, 'Forcener le Subjectile',ls seems at
moments to efface the distinction between these positions, he finishes this
essay as he finishes 'La Parole soufflé', in an aporia. And aporia, it is
worth noting, is one of the four affective states that characterize
mundane oblivion in Valentinian Gnosticism.16 In his earlier work on
Artaud, Derrida sees him caught in an inescapable mental trap, 'a fatal
complicity' which is the 'necessary dependence of all destructive
discourses: they must inhabit the structures they demolish'.17 In forcing
his way out of the rigidified codes of metaphysics, he 'disposes the
language of cruelty within a new form of writing: the most rigorous,

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116 Paragraph
authoritarian, regulated and mathematical'18 - that of the Balinese Dance
Drama, in which every gesture and intonation is prescribed. But this 'Méta-
physique de gestes' is not metaphysical in Derrida's sense of the term as
equatable with diagrammatic thinking based on a range of conceptual
oppositions.
It is just this equation which is denounced by Artaud's mentor René
Guénon. Guénon is quoted (and at that misquoted) only once in 'La Mise
en scène et la métaphysique' but his trenchant views on the superiority of
Oriental over Occidental traditions of thought, and on the importance of
revolutionizing the sense in which we understand the word 'metaphysical'
closely underlie the whole argument of this essay and its predecessor on
the Balinese Theatre. In Guénon's definition, metaphysics is synonymous
with gnosis : 'ce dont il s'agit est la connaissance par excellence, sans
épithète'19 (what it's concerned with is knowledge par excellence, without
qualification). Artaud echoes Guénon's sardonic acknowledgement that
the word is gênante ('Je regrette beaucoup de prononcer ce mot-là'), and
foregrounds it in his title as well as introducing it repeatedly into his argu-
ment as an expression for that which dissolves and converts fallen lan-
guage, restoring its oracular potency.

Faire la métaphysique du langage articulé, c'est faire servir le langage à exprimer

ce qu'il n'exprime pas d'habitude: c'est s'en servir d'une façon nouvelle, excep-
tionnelle et inaccoutumée . . . c'est prendre les intonations d'une manière con-
crète absolue et leur restituer le pouvoir qu'elles auraient de déchirer et de
manifester réellement quelque chose, (p. 44)
(To make metaphysics of spoken language is to make language serve to express
what it doesn't normally express: it's to make use of it in a new way, exceptional
and unwonted . . . it's to treat intonations in a manner which is totally specific
and reinvest them with their potential to tear things apart and to bring about an
actual manifestation.)

The metaphysical project, then, is an alchemical project which escapes

aporia through metanosis.
In 'Forcener le Subjectile' Derrida associates the image of the chora with
le subjectile (the artist's medium or surface material), and he quotes from
the Timaeus Plato's metaphor of the receptacle which is nurse/mother,
that which gives birth and fosters innate life. In this role it is also the
artist's antagonist as he struggles to rescue the force of l'expression from
the forms which threaten to seduce and capture it:

Elle reste indifférente à la figuration et à la substitution des places qui toutes

prennent place en elle qui est la place et l'espacement mêmes. Qu'on lise tous les

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 Artaud and painting 117
Cahiers de Rodez, sans lesquels les dessins de cette époque resteraient plus in-
intelligibles que jamais: on comprendra mieux l'archarnement auprès du sub-
jectile, contre cette khora indifférente, impassible, amorphe, indéterminée,
toute-puissante en cela et nulle pourtant, une et autre à la fois: c'est pour cela qu'il
faut la forcer, lui donner sens alors qu'elle est, elle, hors sens, forcenée. ( FS , p. 97)
(She who is herself place and spacement remains indifferent to all the figurations
and interchanges which take place in her. Unless one has read the Rodez notebooks
in their entirety, the drawings of this period remain unintelligible as ever: to do so is
to understand better the relentlessness towards the subjectile, towards that indif-
ferent, impassive amorphous, indeterminate khora ; all-powerful in this and yet
also null and void, one and another at the same time. That's why she has to be
forced, to give her sense when she's beyond sense, demented.)

Derrida's personification of le subjectile enables a set of virtuoso

manoeuvres. The image of la khora effaces the masculinity of the noun
which signifies a bearer in at least three senses of that word: it is
impregnated with the artist's expression, carries his embryonic work and
ultimately gives birth; it endures the assault of a working process which
involves probing, scratching, cutting, scraping, puncturing, filing, and
laceration; it serves as support for an imprint and bears a message. As the
medium through which the work is forced to pass, it is also the focus of the
artist's paranoia and thus the object of a campaign to 'dement' it and so
confound its treacherous capacity to deliver his inseminations into the
wrong kind of order and form. But the struggle with his protean adversary
finally reveals itself as a form of shadow combat: le subjectile is everything
and nothing, a chimera.
Derrida's own shadow combat with the transcendental signifier is the
subtext of this drama and it could be argued that 'Forcener le Subjectile' is
as much or as little about Artaud as 'Le Suicidé de la société' is about Van
Gogh, that gnostic whose eschatological mission was to see the world
'remis dans la surchauffe du creuset' (cast back into the fierce heat of the
crucible) and who does not need to make métonymie attacks upon his
subjectile when through sheer force of vision he has discovered how to rip
open the hylic terrain itself to reveal 'On ne sait quelle force étrange ... en
train de métamorphoser'20 (who knows what strange force ... in
metamorphosis).
The chora as place of gestation is antinomically evoked in Artaud's
tormented representations of parturition which are derived from Paracel-
san rather than Platonic scenarios, for in the alchemist's crucible birth
takes place contrary to the principles of nature. Jung attempts an explana-
tion of this in 'Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon':

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118 Paragraph
The alchemical operation consisted essentially in separating the Prima Materia ,
the so-called chaos, into the active principle and the passive principle, the body,
which were then reunited in personified form in the coniunctio or 'chymical mar-
riage' . . . From this union sprang the filius sapientiae or filius philosophorum ,
the transformed Mercurius.21

Where the artist risks mimicking the delimiting operations of the

Demiurge, the alchemist imitates those of the redeeming God:

Whereas in Christ God himself became man, the filius philosophorum was
extracted from matter by human art and, by means of the opus, made into a new
light bringer.22

The Rodez drawings strike the observer in the first instance as a manic
pastiche of anatomical hieroglyphs. Stylized bones, muscles, faces, feet
and hands, arms and legs appear in bizarre liaisons as Artaud tortures the
human body in the cause of delivering from it the dispersed atoms of a new
being. This is his commentary on 'Les Os sema' or 'Couti l'anatomie', an
X-ray impression of the bones and joints of the leg:

Je me souviens dans une existence perdue avant de naître dans ce monde-ci avoir
pleuré fibre à fibre sur des cadavres dont les os poussière à poussière se
résorbaient dans le néant ... et de chaque petit os de poussière j'ai eu l'idée dans
la musique sanglotante de l'âme de rassembler un nouveaux corps humain.23
(I remember, in existence lost before my birth into this world, having wept
filament by filament over bodies of which the bones were being resorbed particle
by particle into the void . . . and in the soul's music of lamentation, I had the idea
of rebuilding a new human body from every tiny bone of dust.)

To Artaud, the manacles of the human race are not mind forg'd but the
very essence of the carnal state and his drawings obsessively portray
people encased in geometric capsules, or bound with chains, with their
heads in iron clamps or their swollen flesh nailed to their bones. Paule
Thévenin makes the important observation that Artaud's experience of
being forcibly restrained for electric shock treatment is recorded here,24
but bodies are shown as the agents of violence as well as the registers of
suffering. A raised canon on wheels represents the phallus; limbs
culminate in scythe blades; the transverse section of a bone reveals that it
is lined with vicious spikes by which a phantom micro-being is trapped
and tormented.
During the latter part of 1 946, Artaud shifted his interest from these
thematic compositions to portrait drawings, in which the head is radically
dissociated from the body, looming from the midst of the page on an

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 A rtaud and painting 119

elongated neck or set in totem pole formation with other heads. Where he
construes the body as a sinister aberration to be attacked, he sets out to
portray the human face in a way which will redeem it from 'un espace de
mort perpetuelle'2S (a permanent state of death) by restoring to it the true
features it tries to conceal with its tropes of beauty or pathos or 'character'.
It is as though he has passed through the cycle of torment and dissolution
and is attempting to move closer to the soteriological goal of the
alchemical process: an almost vandalistic impulse to blemish and deface
his subjects now vies with an instinct to attribute to them mysterious and
awesome potency. Throats are scarred with ominous protrusions or
apertures, hair becomes an aura of flame-like red and orange streaks; one
woman has supernumery eyes; another seems halfway through some
bestial metamorphosis with her eyes set in fur like those of a cat. In
Jacques Prevel's portrait, the left side of the cranium swells and assumes
numinous presence, echoing the exaggerated arch of the left eyebrow,
whilst the right side of the portrait collapses into inhibited normality.
Artaud's esoteric transformations of the human face and his reductions
of the body to hieroglyphic fragments banish nature as uncompromisingly
as Uccello's webs of schematized abstraction. But when in the 1 947 Van
Gogh exhibition at l'Orangerie he discovered a painter whose power to
communicate gnosis overwhelmed him, he also discovered a painter
whose luminary authority sprang from an identification of nature with
pneuma, an ability to rend the curtain of matter which obscures the
incandescence of the object as pure being-in-itself. Van Gogh emulated the
Japanese sage who spends his time studying a blade of grass:

But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the
wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he
passes his life, and his life is too short to do the whole.
Come now, isn't it almost an actual religion which these simple Japanese teach
us, who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers?26

In writing about Van Gogh Artaud does not abandon his extravagant
dualism, but he does seem to be shifting his emphasis from an abhorrence
of 'le corps qui sue et pue' (the body which oozes and stinks)27 as the
habitat of demons, to a stress upon the machinations 'les envoûteurs' as
manifested in 'rites psychiques' and involving possession of the mind. The
material transformations of the crucible are metaphors for the perceptual
transformation which is Van Gogh's metanoia : Van Gogh himself writes
of 'a private and secret revolution in men'.28 To encounter the regard of
Van Gogh in his self potraits is to be 'définitivement aliéné à toute vérité

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120 Paragraph

Artaud, Portrait de Jacques-Marie Prevel , Musée National d'Art

Moderne de Paris; copyright MNAMP.

humaine . . . tourné de l'autre côté'29 (alienated definitively from all

human truth . . . turned towards the other side). This turning, by which
Van Gogh passes into that 'réalité . . . terriblement supérieure' sought
after in L'Ombilic des limbes , is counter to that which leads Uccello away
from nature, and which Artaud now denounces: 'La peinture linéaire me
rendait fou depuis longtemps lorsque j'ai rencontré Van Gogh.30 (Linear
painting had been driving me mad for a long time when I discovered Van
Gogh.) The geometric vision occludes colour and light, wherein lies the
transmogrifying charisma of the gnostic vision. Artaud's celebration of
these qualities brings his text close to Van Gogh's own writing.

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 Artaud and painting 121

Meditations upon colour, sometimes building in intensity to an ecstatic

paean, continually spill over from the paintings to the letters, and vice-
versa as Van Gogh so often captures his mirages in words before
interpreting them with his palette. Artaud's preference for symphonic
metaphors in describing the compositional genius displayed in the
tableaux is also derived from Van Gogh's letters, where musical terms are
habitually used to interpret work in progress; particular concentration is
devoted to the analogy between tonal qualities in Wagner's music and the
chromatic effulgence the painter strives to achieve.
As a synthesis of poetry, painting and music Van Gogh's oeuvre might
be seen as at last fulfilling Artaud's quest for a language capable of
breaking up the fixed forms of representaton which trap and pervert
gnostic thought. The idea that this 'aliéné authentique' has discovered a
language of gnosis, and thereby the power to release insights profoundly
dangerous to the archonic powers, is a theme which Artaud foregrounds
emphatically, but his attempts to determine the qualities of the language
itself oblige him to relinquish some of his earlier convictions, and
confront him with the impossibility of formulaic (even alchemically
formulaic) interpretations. Van Gogh's realization of 'la vieille force
magique d'une pensée cent fois refoulée' (p. 32) (the ancient magic
power of a thought a hundred times repressed) substantially contravenes
the thesis on language put forward in 'La Mise en scène et la méta-
physique'. As musician, dramatist and writer, he never compromises the
purity and distinctness of his dominant form - he is 'le plus vraiment
peintre de tous les peintres, le seul qui n'ait pas voulu dépasser la pein-
ture comme moyen strict de son oeuvre et cadre strict de ses moyens' (p.
46) (the truest painter of all the painters, the only one who has not
sought to go beyond painting as strictly the means of his work, and
strictly the boundary of his means). Instead of shunning the natural
world, he makes it the abiding focus of his vision. And his revelations are
brought about not through the generation of a forcefield which controls
and revolutionizes the relations between signs, but by a meditative pro-
cess which operates upon the object in its extant state, overseeing its
becoming as sign in a new and transfigured presence:

Ses tournesols d'or bronzé sont peints; ils sont peints comme des tournesols et
rien de plus, mais pour comprendre un tournesol en nature, il faut maintenant
en revenir à van Gogh. (p. 47)
(His sunflowers of bronzed gold are painted; they are painted like sunflowers
and nothing more, but now, to understand a sunflower in nature, you have to
go back to Van Gogh.)

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122 Paragraph
The sunflower and the candle are the prototype of the motif. Irradiating
from a microcosmic centre, they make a mockery of Uccello's search for a
cosmic nucleus in the eye of God and defy the all encompassing 'feu du
ciel' of the Lot painting. Their counterpart is the hylic crow, which sucks
light into an 'excremental' blackness and hovers above 'une formidable
écume de vagues de boue' ('Dossier', VG, p. zoo) (an awesome morass of
billowing mud). A flock of crows, subject of the final painting, are both
portents and agents of the artist's death, emissaries of 'les envoûteurs'.
The image of Van Gogh walking through a darkened landscape in a hat
ringed with candles suggests that he has adopted this pneumatic emblem
for protection: here the counteractive totems of crow and candle recreate
an exoteric dualism which challenges the axiological prejudices of
Gnosticism. Metaphysical difference returns to the world of forms, visible
as both hyle and pneuma to the seer who may also learn the power to
make them signify to the eye of the mind, where their indelible trace
'commence ses récitations sombres à l'heure même où on a cessé de la voir
(p. 47) (begins its sombre recitations in the hour when we have ceased to
look at it). That primal anxiety of influence which leads the gnostic to vil-
ify the Demiurge and all his works is dissolved as Van Gogh makes an art-
ist's representation the precursor of creation: after seeing one of his
landscapes, Artaud claims, it seems thereafter that nature is made in its
image.
JANE GOODALL
University of Newcastle
New South Wales, Australia

NOTES

i The drawing is reproduced in Antonin Artaud, dessins et portraits

Gallimard, 1986). This volume contains accompanying essays by
Thévenin and Jacques Derrida.
2 Harold Bloom, 'Lying Against Time' in The Rediscovery of Gnosti
Proceedings Of the International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale,
28-31, 1978 (Leiden, E. S. Brill, 1980), p. 65.
3 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd. Ed. (Boston, Beacon Press,
p. 71.
4 See Julia Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poétique (Paris, Seuil, 1974),
Ch. 2.
5 Antonin Artaud, Préface to Le Théâtre et son Double, Œuvres Completes,
tome IV (Paris, Gallimard, 1978), p. 14.
6 'Dossier du Théâtre et son Double ', OC IV, p. 213.

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 Artaud and painting 123

7 'Sur le Théâtre Balinais', OC IV, p. 6 1 .

8 'Paul les Oiseaux ou la Place de l'amour', OC i**, p. io.
9 L'Ombilic des limbes , OC i*, p. 49.
10 'Préface pour un livre d'eaux-fortes de Jean de Bosschere', OC 1 1, p. 223.
1 1 'Dossier du Théâtre et son Double', p. 242.
12 'La Mise en scène et la métaphysique', OC IV, p. 35.
13 In a letter to Jean Paulhan concerning the preparation of his text for publica-
tion, Artaud appropriates the demiurgical symbolism as he waxes irate about
some adjustments to his syntax. Syntactical gaffs must be countenanced at
times, he avers, 'si on sent qu'elles font partie de la forme du mouvement, du
feu spécial, de la facette étrangement allumée d'une pensée particulière et qui
avait besoin de cette perversion pour saisir ce feu secret, cette illumination
d'une de ses facettes cachées'. (Letter to Jean Paulhan, 30 jan. 1932, OC V,
p. 61.)
14 In Antonin Artaud , la fidélité à i infini (Paris, Balland, 1987), Françoise
Bonardel examines the network of esoteric ideas which is developed through
his œuvre, stressing the underlying consistency of his mythopoeia. This is an
impressively researched study by an authority on Hermetic literature.
Umberto Artioli's essay 'Production de "réalité" ou faim d'impossible?' (in
Europe , nov.-déc. 1984) explores in some detail the alchemical and gnostic
imagery of Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société , applying the theoretical
implications of this in a critique of Deleuze & Guattari's V Anti-Œdipe.
1 5 In Antonin Artaud , dessins et potraits , op. cit.
16 Jonas, op. cit., p. 188.
17 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference , translated by Alan Bass (London,
Routledge, 1981), p. 194.
18 Ibid., p. 190.
19 René Guénon, Orient et Occident (Paris, Editions Vega, 1983), p. 153.
20 Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société , QC XIII, p. 25.
21 C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies , translated by R. F. C. Hull (London, Rout-
ledge, 1967), P- I22-
22 Ibid., p. 127.
23 Commentary on 'Couti l'anatomie', OC XVIII, p. 73.
24 See 'Un insurgé de l'art', introduction by Paule Thévenin to the catalogue for
the 1987 exhibition of Artaud's dessins at the Centre Georges Pompidou
(Paris, Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987).
25 'Le visage humain', exhibition catalogue, p. 48.
26 Vincent Van Gogh, letter to Theo, Sept. 1 888, in The Letters of Vincent Van
Gogh , edited by Mark Roskill (London, Fontana, 1983), p. 295.
27 OC X, p. 208.
28 Van Gogh, op. cit., p. 295.
29 'Dossier de Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société ', OC XIII, p. 206 and p. 207.
30 Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société. OC XIII, p. 25.

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