442
PARTISAN REVIEW
I didn't go
to
the Tarahumaras
to
look for Jesus Christ but rather for
myself,
Me.
Antonin Artaud, born September 4, 1896 in Marseille, 4,
rue du Jardin des Plantes, from a uterus I had no need of and which I
never had any need of even before, because that's no way to be born,
when you're copulated and masturbated nine months by the membrane,
the shiny membrane which devours without teeth as the Upanishads
say, and I know that I was born in a different way, from my works and
not from a mother, but the Mother resolved
to
take me and
you
see the
result in my life.
To be born is the most dramatic example of a substance falling away
from itself. The common denominator of Artaud's views on theater, lan–
guage and psychology, as well as of his rejection of God and his mad claim
that he owes his existence
to
no one but himself, is his revulsion at the phe–
nomenon of dropping. To drop away from a source is
to
be derived from that
source; and derivation is the mode of repetition which Artaud abhors. But
it is as if he sawall repetitions as examples of derivation. It is therefore only
in doing away with repetition itself that Artaud can hope both to correct the
"mistake" of his birth and, like Rimbaud, to succeed in making the present
give birth to itself in freeing it from any responsibility to the past.
In Artaud, the revolutionizing of the self implicit in this project is pur–
sued with psychotic panic; and in that panic Artaud makes explicit the ter–
rifying fantasies about the body which inform both his plans for a " theater
of cruelty" and his repudiation of birth. These fantasies can be exceptionally
useful in helping us
to
see what is at stake in perhaps all attempts to simplify
character to desublimated, discontinuous scenes of the desiring imagination.
"The anus is always terror," Artaud writes in a letter from the asylum at
Rodez in which he attacks the " fecality" in Lewis Carroll's
Jabberwocky
as being that of "an English snob, who makes little curls of the obscene in
himself as if he were applying curling-tongs to ringlets."
Jabberwocky
is
soulless because it is without authentic obscenity: "I refuse to admit that
one can lose any excrement without acutely suffering from the simultan–
eous loss of one's soul, and there is no soul
inJabberwocky.
" From his early
letters to Jacques Riviere to the hallucinating messages from Rodez, the con–
stant theme of Artaud's anguish is a terrified fantasy of a dropping away of
the self. To Riviere, he complains of "une veritable deperdition," of "a
central caving in of the soul .. . a kind of erosion ... of thought ." At Rodez,
twenty years later, the connection between this spiritual erosion and loss of
the soul through the anus will be made explicit. What is the logic of this
connection? Why is the anus terror?
We may consider the excremental process and birth as the most appro–
priate physical models for all ontological reflection about individuality, self-
