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PARTISAN REVIEW
Despite some extraordinary descriptions of the peyote rites and his own
experience of peyote, the book is impersonal, aloof, and distant. The
Indians do not come alive; they remain always icons within Artaud's
personal mythology.
The Peyote Dance
is very much the work of a
lonely man-a man tormented by an inability either to detach himself
from experience or to accept it wholely.
It
is, in its way, a record of
Artaud's martyrdom.
When Artaud writes, for example, at the beginning of the first
essay (in the American edition) "incredible as it may seem, the
Tarahumara Indians live as though they were already dead," we are at
. first tempted to read this as an extravagant image that i somehow
descriptive of the Indians. By the end of the essay-it is only six pages
long-we know it is Artaud speaking of himself, of the mummy
(Artaud Ie Morna) dead and yet paradoxically preserved as alive. Death
for Artaud, we must remember, is a means "to regain the emptiness of a
crystalline liberty."
It
is a liberation from life-life which, in a
meditation on suicide, he describes as "a consenting to the apparent
readability of things and their relationship to the mind." The image of
man, neither alive nor dead, the mummy, god even (Artaud had such
delusions) mutilated, castrated, martyred, Christ, Osiris, Adoni , ap–
pears in ritual splendour at the end of "Tutuguri." The poem was
written two weeks before Artaud's death of rectal cancer on March 4,
1948.
there, the advancing horse bears the tor
0
of a man,
a naked man who holds aloft
not a cross,
but a staff of ironwood
attached to a giant horseshoe
that encircles his whole body,
his body cut with a slash of blood,
and the horseshoe is there
like the jaws of an iron collar
which the man has caught
in the slash of blood.
Artaud explains in a letter
to
his publisher Marc Barbizat that "The
new Tutuguri that I am writing for you is heavy with a blood
experience which I did not have in 1936. This blood experience is that I
had here three attacks in which I was found bathing in my blood, in an
entire sea of blood, and Tutuguri comes out of this."
VINCENT CRAPANZANO
