Remember, Repeat, Inhabit

A Study of Antonin Artaud, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Nikhil Chopra

Ronojoy Sircar

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789388912983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Remember, Repeat, Inhabit looks at three questions in relation to the idea of the viewer: What happens when one reads someone else's reading of someone else?
What happens when something repeats itself in Kieslowski's work?
Is there a possibility of an ontology of space? The book attempts to understand the idea of 'viewing' from the inside, not simply as an ontological premise but definitely affected by it. Three differing contexts are looked at-a French madman's notion of the 'self', a Polish filmmaker's notion of the 'everyday' and an Indian performance artist's notion of 'memory'. Through these on-the-surface contrasting artists and texts, a particular idea of a 'viewer' emerges. This viewer is the key to an understanding of something almost elemental in the nature of the idea of 'viewing' in the contemporary context of twenty-first-century Delhi.

1

VIEWER AS READER

Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and understandable. He is a cultural monument as long as one mainly refers to his ideas without reading much of his work. For anyone who reads Artaud through, he remains fiercely out of reach, an unassimilable voice and presence (Sontag 2002: 70).

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) needs to be read. But if we are to understand what leads to Sontag’s relegation of him into a space where we are to read about him, ‘his ideas’, and not his texts (literary or otherwise), what she is inadvertently suggesting is a kind of difficulty which doesn’t allow for a reading in the first place, something that resists our (the reader’s) attempts at reading. Then, what I would like to put forth in the course of this chapter is a ‘non-reading’ of Artaud’s self-portraits from his time in Rodez where what I would be doing is circling around Artaud to come to the various ways in which this non-reading can be made visible as a form of reading in itself. For that to take place, I will be forced to confront Artaud’s ‘madness’, the sense of ‘loss’ that persists through most of his work and the necessity to find a sense in which both could be understood in relation to one another and therefore Artaud. For this, I would have to tackle Artaud in a slightly unorthodox manner, and in media res. The following lines will not be fragmentary approaches to Artaud though they might seem that way at first, since settling down in a study of ‘non-reading’ is not something that comes naturally to someone who has become used to reading in a certain way, following a certain logic, a certain rationale which pushes against the words to reveal itself without any effort on the reader’s part. Keeping this in mind, let’s begin.

Rodez, 1945/Delhi, 2014

Is the search for selves central to Artaud at this time in particular or has it always been the case with all who seek madness or rather all who are sought—looked and searched—for being mad. It is unclear at this point whether the search for what he (Artaud) sought after, stems from a narcissistic zeal or is merely a preamble to a very specific ontological project. I am becoming more and more confused as to whether they are at the end of the day two mutually exclusive categories or something intertwined far more intricately than I presumed at first.

Perhaps, the closest thing we have to an answer is that at the beginning of 1945 Artaud began to draw on his own and with such an all-absorbing intensity that it may have appeared to [Gaston] Ferdiere that there had been a crucial shift in Artaud’s focus from unacceptable misbehaviour to a concentration on a creative project. What Artaud confronted while working on those large sheets of paper with pencils, crayons and chalk was his own destruction. ‘In flurries of dismemberment and reconstitution, images of splinters, cancers, torn bodies, penises, insects, spikes and internal organs were projected and realigned’ (Artaud 1995: 27–28).

This was an empty cell in Rodez, filled with Artaud’s searching hands plastering paper after paper with himself taken apart and put back together. The act of putting back together is brought out by Eshleman as a ‘reconstitution’ but isn’t it anything but that? There is no subversive tendency in Artaud’s drawings in that it doesn’t try to deliberately create ruptures within found ‘natural’ anatomies and transform them in his process of drawing, thus framing them. What I mean to suggest here is that it is not the drawings themselves that are (or are not) necessarily subversive, but the very movement of the process of drawing itself. Let me elaborate.

The question of subversion needs to be placed out of the regular leanings that one does in the time that these words are being written down. In other words, one needs to dispel a particular form of understanding of the subversive and the process of subverting itself. Subversion would usually mean that the order in which, you, the reader, are reading these words becomes visible, as just that—an order. What is happening in this case then, is a rewriting of the very process of reading and writing relating always to the reader—you. This could very well be a reconstitution, in just as much, as an actor looking out the screen at the viewer seems to reconstitute both spaces of the inside as well as the outside of the cinematic/televised sphere. With Artaud, however, one needs to be slightly more careful as to what one means when one speaks of ‘subversion’. Some of what Artaud did and continues to do, is indeed subversive in the kind of reconstitutive way that Eshleman talks about. But for the most part, the drawings in that particular later period in Rodez, under electroshock therapy, are something else altogether. But for this to be reasonably elucidated, a few more things surrounding Artaud’s characterisation in the history of literature, thought or artistry need to be visualised first.

In Sontag’s initial placement of Artaud as a ‘modern author’ his role is mapped out thus, ‘The modern authors can be recognized by their effort to disestablish themselves, by their will not to be morally useful to the community, by their inclination to present themselves not as social critics but as seers, spiritual adventurers and social pariahs’ (Sontag 2002: 15).

Now obviously, one must produce some explanation to put the immediate conflation of Artaud the person and Artaud the artist in the particular circumstance that this chapter is trying to place him in.

Eshleman suggests the period from 1920 to 1936 as ‘the most frenetic of his life’ (Artaud 1995: 4). It is during this time that he is encountered by Georges Bataille.¹ In 1925, Bataille along with Theodore Fraenkel would run into Artaud in Paris ‘in a brasserie on rue Pigalle’ where as he recalls,

Artaud would talk to Fraenkel about his nervous troubles. He used drugs, was in a bad way, and Fraenkel tried hard to make his life easier. He and Fraenkel conferred in private. Then there would be no talking at all, so that Artaud and I got to know one another fairly well without ever having spoken. (Bataille and Leiris 2008: 56)

It is in this way that Bataille begins his several encounters with Artaud over the course of many years.² I would like to focus on a specific lecture that Artaud would go on to give in 1933 at the Sorbonne on ‘The Theatre and the Plague’. This lecture was attended by several now-famous literary names, including Anais Nin and Georges Bataille, both of whom remember the incident, but access it in different ways.

Bataille: Some years later, I heard him give a lecture at the Sorbonne (but I didn’t go up to him at the end). He was talking about art in the theatre and in my half-asleep state of attention I saw him stand up all of a sudden; I realized what he was saying: he had decided to make us privy to the state of mind of Thyestes when he grasped he was eating his own children. In front of an auditorium filled with bourgeois (there were hardly any students), he held his belly in both hands and let out the most unearthly scream that ever issued from the throat of a man. This was as disturbing as it might have felt had one of our friends abruptly gone raving mad. It was dreadful (perhaps the more so for having been only acted). (Bataille and Leiris 2008: 56–57)

Nin: …Then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began…. His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion. (as quoted by Eshleman in Artaud 1995: 11–12)

What is not important at this juncture is to try and nitpick on the topic of the lecture as remembered by either person in attendance (Bataille was clearly drowsy) but an elaboration on how each of them accessed the unfolding of this act on stage. For Bataille, what became vivid in his remembrance of Artaud at this moment was the unnerving way in which Artaud thinned the line between what was acted and experienced, this thinning of the line placing this entire event in a moment of madness, a madness that came all of a sudden and without prior notice. A sudden change in the demeanour of a person familiar to him with no way in which he could now approach the person within this articulation of suffering—almost as if the acting out of this pain protected Artaud from the accessibility of the audience rendering him alone in this pain where the only thing for the audience to do was to witness it. For Nin, the ‘act’ led to a deeper understanding of the pain of the effects of the ‘plague’, the actions on stage leading the audience towards a space of empathetic engagement.³ Nin’s recollection leads directly to the idea of death as an act whereas Bataille’s leads towards madness. Further on:

Bataille: In time, I learned about the outcome of his trip to Ireland, which was followed by his being locked up. I could have said that I didn’t care for him… and I had the feeling that someone was fighting my shadow or walking over my grave. I was sad at heart, and then I thought no more of it. (Bataille and Leiris 2008: 57)

This all happened outside of the performance of the day but somehow it was carefully related to it, shaped by it and moved out of/from the Artaud on stage, to the Artaud off it. Bataille’s impulse to understand these actions force him to confront Artaud, and thus, madness, somehow leading on to a rumination on the self—linked to death. There is a visible gap within this recollection that is filled in by Nin, a gap which though does not necessarily negotiate the tensions between madness and death but is certainly formed by it—a gap filled with an unsettling laughter.

Nin: At first people grasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughing! They hissed. Then one by one, they began to leave…. Artaud went on, until the last grasp. And stayed on the floor. Then when the hall had emptied of all but his small group of friends, he walked straight up to me and kissed my hand. He asked me to go to a café with him…. He spat out his anger. ‘They always want to hear about; they want to hear an objective conference on “The Theater and the Plague,” and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken. I want to awaken them. They do not realize they are dead.’ (Artaud 1995: 12)

It is this tendency within Artaud that one can see a glimpse of in Sontag’s judgement of Artaud towards the end of her essay that forms the prelude to this chapter and sets the tone for it. The tendency to lead one to the precipice of fiction towards a kind of verisimilitude which doesn’t just resemble experience but maybe pushes the edges of a reflection on experience into the realm of experience itself where fiction becomes experience. Does fiction then cease to be just that, fiction? It is in this particular sense that encountering the Rodez self-portraits becomes more urgent. But before one does that, let’s try and build this tension between madness and dying and what it means for an experience of either through an act of creation/reading.

A necessary digression would take us through a certain idea of the ‘joker’ where the creation of laughter is part of a certain theatricality that is both subversive while at the same time being immersive in a language of solitude.⁴ Now, in the sense in which this chapter is proceeding, the link to death then needs to be further clarified and nowhere is it more popularly visible than in the character of the ‘Joker’. The ‘Joker’ is a super-criminal in the DC comic universe who is placed as a foil to the vigilante ‘Batman’ and whose sole purpose is to create a rupture in everything that Batman holds dear in the city: the idea of justice and a serious predilection to a certain gravitas. Like all alter-egos, the Joker and Batman are destined to be eternally linked in their shared occupation of ‘Gotham City’ and their unspoken similarities to one another regardless of varying ideologies and methods. Both share a tragic past from which they each emerge masked (one with a cowl and the other with make-up) to make their ideologies a reality—to make Gotham function in the way they believe to be what the city needs. What differs is not their notion of ‘justice’—both believe the city and its systems and procedures to be unjust—but how they deal with that notion. Where (the) Batman tries to provide a sense of justice through his crime-fighting activities, the Joker tries to un-sense whatever little notion of justice the city has. One of the most wonderful articulations of the closeness and at the same time distance between the two is articulated on the last page of Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1996).

Here, once again, it is laughter that links, and perhaps bridges the distance between madness, and death. Batman does not kill. And the Joker never kills the Batman.⁵ A few pages back, the Joker takes out a gun and points it at Batman, to only have a flag with the words ‘bang bang’ pop out of the tunnel of the gun. In the ambiguous uncertainty of the end of this particular comic, the reader watches as in between the laughter shared by both the characters Batman’s hand stretches out in the middle section seemingly to kill the Joker but there is no closure, no eventual ‘act’ of murder or dying. There can be no Batman without the Joker and vice versa.⁶ What places this particular story apart from most other Batman-related stories is the intensity and sensitivity with which Moore writes the origin story of the Joker. It is through the reader’s constant engagement with this that the end of the comic can gain such poignancy.

The Joker is not just another criminal, in a string of super-criminals, whom Batman has to face in his work in Gotham city. He is the counter-myth to the myth of Batman. Keeping that in mind, the last page visualises the connection between the two characters, the distance seemingly at first being bridged by the laughter that ensues which is of course ruptured by Batman’s outstretched hand, only to lead to their unusual disappearance from the site of their final confrontation in the comic where all that remains in the last panels is the rain filtering down on the streets of Gotham.

According to Samuel Weber,

This moment of ecstasy or of excess is, paradoxically perhaps, also one of great isolation and solitude, not at all one of mystical union. The French have an expression for this—fou rire—which designates what we might call, more clinically, ‘hysterical laughter’. But the English expression that is closer is to ‘die laughing’. For indeed, a kind of death, a relation to death, is very much at stake in this theatrical excess. (1996: 8)

The Batman and the Joker are then linked in this moment of both ‘excess’, as well as ‘great isolation and solitude’ by their combined laughter’s connection to death. Uncertain or otherwise, it is the end to the comic and thus the end of this particular chapter in Moore’s imagining(s) of their characters in this part of the DC comic universe, if not the end of the characters themselves who would live on to becomes part of many other stories. What this text elaborates then is the intrinsic way(s) in which what is seen as madness is linked to a sense of loss resulting from an idea of an end. What Artaud was trying to communicate to Nin in a café after his lecture, was this very necessity to be able to fictionalise experience to experience it; where there is no longer a question of ‘first-hand’ or other kinds of experience, articulating essentially the availability of art as another medium for experience. Wherein what needs to be reoriented is a mundane understanding of experience as something that happens to us, or that which we, as subjects happen to but rather as a kind of lens through which we give form (with or without understanding) to the various realities that we gather and express through our...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prolegomenon
• 1. Viewer as Reader
• 2. Viewer as Viewer
• 3. Inhabiting the Viewer
• Postscript
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author