MYTH OF THE PRIMITIVE
THE PEYOTE DANCE
by
Antonin Artaud. Translated
by
Helen
Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. $7.95.
"There where others propose works, I claim nothing more
than to reveal my mind." With these words Antonin Artaud began his
second book,
L 'OmbiIic des L imbes,
published in 1925. He was
beginning, too, a scriptorial trajectory that was
to
challenge not only
the assumptions of Western theater,
Ie theatre digestif
as he called it,
but the problematic of language itself-a language through which,
inevitably condemned, he had yet to seek liberation. Artaud was
doomed, despite his foray into surrealism, his theatrical iconoclasm
(now, perversely, mainstream avant garde), his experimentation with
the hallucinogenic rituals of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, the
ostensible subject of
The Peyote Dance,
his
protestations verbaies
contre Ie verbe,
his pleas for a material, corporeal language, his pun–
beleaguered poetry, despite even his madness'. The unconscious, Lacan
reminds us aphoristically, is the discourse of the Other.
Artaud did not then , at the age of twenty-nine, conceive of his
oeuvres as detached from life.
Each of my works , each of the sketches of myself, each of the icey
blossomings of my inner soul drools over me.
Artaud, in fact, could never permit himself the luxury of the genitive.
The "of," better still the"
de"
with its ablative connotations, remained
always a copulative which he had either to accept totally, accepting
thereby his martyrdom, or to reject totally, rejecting thereby his mind,
his spirit, his
esprit.
"Nor do I conceive of the mind as detached from
myself, " he wrote in
L 'Ombilic.
A year earlier, in a letter
to
Riviere, he
complained:
I suffer from a frightening disease of the mind. My thought abandons
me at all levels. From the simple fact of the thought to the external
fact of its materialization in words. Words, sentence forms, interior
thought directions, simple reactions of the mind, I am in constant
pursuit of my intellectual being. When then I can grasp a form,
however imperfect, I fix it, in the fear of losing the entire thought.
It
is beneath me, I know, I suffer from it, but I agree to it in the fear of
not dying altogether.
