"The Catastrophes of Heaven": Modernism, Primitivism, and the Madness of Antonin Artaud

To heal the catastrophes of heaven, Voyage to the land of speaking blood. ¹

I

These words, with their suggestion of a hoped-for remedy for world catastrophe, are those of the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), the exemplary madman of the modernist avant-garde. They were written in 1935, shortly before Artaud embarked on his own quest for the primitive, a journey to visit the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. Artaud was, by then, thoroughly disgusted with modern civilization and profoundly disillusioned about the possibility of redemption through art. He believed that “reason, a European faculty, exalted beyond measure by the European mentality, is always an image of death”; that reason had “created the contemporary despair and the material anarchy of the world by separating the elements of the world which a real culture would bring together” (SW, 358–59). In Mexico, in the land of the Tarahumara, Artaud expected to find a true culture, a land of speaking blood where consciousness and language, instead of causing a rupture in being, would be the medium of a deep unity between self and world, spirit and body, intellect and emotion. “Because I kept seeing around me men lying . . . I felt the need . . . to go away to a place where I could at least freely advance with my heart,” he wrote (PD, 71). “I came to Mexico to make contact with the red earth” (SW, 537). Stopping off in Mexico City, Artaud was dismayed to find that the city dwellers there had no interest in the Indian cultures surrounding them. He took this as a bad omen. “Nevertheless,” he wrote in a letter home, “the Indians exist. . . . and soon I am going to reach the Indians . . . and there I hope to be understood” (SW, 365).

There is no figure who better illuminates the complex relationships among three closely related topoi of our age: modernism, madness, and the primitive or tribal mind. A profound influence on modernist art, perhaps the decisive influence on avant-garde theater, Artaud clearly had a critical attitude toward many of the central trends of modern culture and thought. He also spent nine of his last eleven years in asylums. There he displayed many classical signs and symptoms of paranoid, catatonic, and deteriorated forms of schizophrenia—an illness that many psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, as well as many anti-psychiatrists and members of the artistic avant-garde, have seen as involving a regression to the earliest, most unreflective and instinct-ridden stages of human life.

In Artaud’s embarking for the land of the Tarahumara, we have the spectacle of a schizophrenic artist, a person of immense influence on twentieth-century culture, setting out on his own quest for the primitive. ² Ironically enough, he too yearns for the very mode of life—primal and undivided, imbued with passion, immediacy, and a sense of mystical participation—that, according to traditional theoretical accounts, underlies his own psychological condition. ³ It seems, then, that the schizophrenic, at least this schizophrenic, can be as susceptible as anyone else to the myth and the lure of the primitive; and it is worth asking why this should be the case. Does Artaud sense a fundamental affinity between his own mode of being and that of the Tarahumara of his imagination, living in immediate connection with their emotions and in symbiosis with the surrounding world? Or could it be just the reverse: namely, that for Artaud the Tarahumara seemed to offer the haven of an existence quite antithetical to his own?

In both worlds where he has been a figure of importance, anti-psychiatry and the artistic avant-garde, Artaud has been primarily understood in the first way. Since the 1960s he has served as the paradigmatic instance of the madman as wildman or primitive, a person who is supposed to incarnate the irrationalist and primitivist esthetic of which he is perhaps the most influential modern exponent. ⁴ He is the emblematic figure for those who adopt Dionysian notions of madness, of modernism (and postmodernism), and of modernism as a kind of madness; and he...