Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia

5. Libidinous Mannerisms and Profligate Abominations

5 / Libidinous Mannerisms and Profligate Abominations A roll of the dice will never abolish chance, but a flick of the tongue will knot it and another willpronounce it. I Antonin Artaud, Cahiers du retour a Paris "I am dead" (15:142; 16:301; i/:^),1 This seemingly impossible enunciation, this existential oxymoron, operates in Artaud 's last works as an expletive, in protest against that living death he suffered as a result of both of his schizophrenia and the pains of electroshock. In tales spoken from the point of view of the dead, the self-reflexive possibilities of language establish narrative ambiguity and identificatory contradiction. Artaud's continual diatribe against the written text as detritus, as a tomb, as the very betrayal of life, is necessitated by his desire to maintain the living voice in a realm where it has no place. In order to express the inexpressible, the ineifable, one needs to create icons; extreme pain and madness necessitate hyperbolic icons, such as God and the devil. There are also, of course, icons for death. Is this death an expression of extreme pain, or is pain an indicator of death, transformed into vanitast In either case, the entirety of Artaud's last works, beginning at the moment he started to write again at the psychiatric asy- /ii5 Chapter 5 lum of Rodez in 1945 (diaries begun after years of isolation, but already prefigured by his earliest aesthetic arguments in the correspondence of the mid-i92os with Jacques Riviere), was founded on the existential primacy of pain. The blue horror, of exceeding oneself in that extremepain, which will no longer be pain in the end. That is what I never stopped thinking. (24:391) It is, of course, possible to understand his electroshock treatments as a hyperbolic, radical homeopathy, as a means of fighting pain with pain, where the torments of schizophrenia were to be counteracted by electrically induced suffering. This would account for a double source of death, of the disappearance of others and the world: through the eschatological deliria of paranoia and the effects of extreme pain. Elaine Scarry explains, in The Body in Pain, the ontological implications of the latter condition : "Physical pain is able to obliterate psychological pain because it obliterates all psychological content, painful, pleasurable , and neutral. Our recognition of its power to end madness is one of the ways in which, knowingly or unknowingly, we acknowledge its power to end all aspects of self and world."2 Whence Artaud's question, "Why is an outside indispensable in order for me to remake myself before the blows of nothingness?" (23:81), which leads to the equivocation between the iconography of the theater of cruelty and the iconoclasm of Artaud's polemical, performative, and theoretical stance. In "Alienation et magie noire" (Alienation and Black Magic), a section of Artaud le Momo (Artaud the Madman), Artaud states that in order to "abject god," he wishes to place, "awhite page to separate the text of the book which has ended from all the swarming of Bardo that appeared in the limbo of electroshock" (12:61). Is this empty page, this suppression of text, this silent void, a textual icon of death or a gesture of iconoclasm? As in the via negativa of Western mysticism, this paradox is / 116 Libidinous Mannerisms & Profligate Abominations constituted by both the total negation of predicates and the coincidence of contradictions, renunciations of logic typical of both mystics and the insane. Artaud's morbid psychic dynamism and mad iconography hinge on an all-too-human coincidentia oppositorum, where God is simultaneously "the monomaniac of the unconscious" and "a fluidic emanation of my human body" (15:315) Whence the constant tension and contradiction in Artaud between the meaningless emptiness of the void and the incommensurable plenitude of God, between the perpetual psychic dispersion of libidinal force and the inevitable stasis of the idol as sign, between anarchy crowned and ritual repeated, between a spasmatic charismatics and a hypostatized sacred hieroglyphics . In the tradition of Pascalian theological anguish, Artaud poses the problem in Pour enfinir avec lejugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God): "He is offered two paths: that of the infinite outside, that of the infinitesimal inside " (13:85) The chiasmaric intersection of these transcendental paths (that of mystic closure and psychotic rupture) is precisely what constitutes the limits of the human condition, the mystery of which was to...