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PARTISAN REVIEW
gasping for air inside myself, unable to find myself, knowing perfectly
well that I was somewhere but the devil knew where, as if I were d ead."
He writes four years later in a postscript to this essay that it
represents my first effort to return to myself after seven years of
estrangement and total castration. In it a recent victim of poisoning,
sequestered and traumatized, recalls what happened before his death .
This explains why the text can do no more than stammer.
He adds-in what must be taken as more than sensationalist rhetoric–
that it was written "in the dulled mental state of a convert whom the
magical spells of the priestly rabble, taking advantage of his momen–
tary weakness, were keeping in a state of enslavement." Thirteen days
later, in a continuation of the postscript, he claims to have between 150
and 200 hosts in him. Nothing appears "more erotically pornographic
than Christ, ignoble sexual materialization of all false psychic enig–
mas... ."
It
was this state of conversion, Artaud maintains, that
accounted for his "delirium" on the subject of Chris't and the cross in
the essay. There is continual movement-shifts in perspective, in
lucidity, in mental disposition-in the essays.
The Peyote Dance,
in its contorted and involuted totality, comes
(unwittingly I suspect) as close to Artaud's ideal discourse as anything
he wrote.
It
is, despite its ostensible subject, its own subject. It is an
encounter, created and recreated, distorted and corrected, symbolized
and resymbolized, discussed and digested, though never fully. It can–
not be read as an .ethnographic text (though some pedestrian anthro–
pologists have tried to do so), as a psychiatric history, an adventure
story, or a spiritual quest. This is its fascination. Artaud came as
close to achieving
here,
in his text, what he sought
there,
among the
Tarahumara.
Though planned in his life time,
The Peyote Dance
was not
published until 1955-eight years after his death. Now comes the
Farrar, Straus and Giroux translation which, with the exception of a
few banalities on the dust jacket, abandons the work to its readers
without an introduction, an epilogue, a chronology, or a justification
for the order of the selections-all essential to appreciate the develop–
ment of Artaud's response to his encounter with the Tarahumara. My
French edition, which reflects Artaud's wishes concerning this order, is
significantly different. Artaud would probably have been pleased with
his American achievement, were it not that it hangs on the commercial
force of "peyote" and "Artaud."
Artaud is, nevertheless, subject to language-to the myth of the
