The Case of Antonin Artaud and the Possibility of Comparative (Religion) Literature

"I am Mr. Antonin Artaud of the Himalaya but I passed through Marseilles, 4 rue Jardin des Plantes, Smyrna, Switzerland, Saint-Malo, Procida, Rome, Paris, Lyon, Berlin, Brussels, Brussels, Mexico, Ireland"

(XX 361)

What does the delirious case of Antonin Artaud have to teach us about the possibility of comparativist studies? The libidinal, geopolitical, and literary determinants of his desire to perform a comparative analysis of cultures, religions, and literatures situates this project in-between the imaginary poles of the two Indies (represented, for him, by Mexico and India). A close reading of Artaud's attempt to grapple with the cultural contradictions of a fractured world-picture problematizes the desire to comprehend the whole globe—a desire that has impelled studies of world literature ever since Herder—yet his mercurially reflexive writings produce more than this critique of comprehension. Artaud's case exceeds the psychoanalytic parameters that limit both critical readings of his oeuvre and contemporary interpretations of a deliriously globalized epistemic desire. My reading of Artaud will displace accusations of comparativism as innately ethnocentric in order to dissect a cultural motivation that is often passed over in silence: the desire to re-make the body through a displacement of the Western subject without reserve.

Voyage in Place

"Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities, even if they develop in extension. To think is to voyage . . .": Thus spoke Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 482). Florence Mèredieu's Antonin Artaud: Voyages (1992) traces the writer's deterritorialized wanderings in the literatures, cultures, and religions of the world by representing his ventures as "the schizophrenic processus" or "the equivalent of an initiatory voyage" (37).¹ In the following pages I will demonstrate that these two interpretative figures—a thinking-in-place situated in one's own territory and an initiation into another's territory—are inadequate if we are to follow Artaud's voyages to their limits.

Mèredieu narrates Artaud's geographical displacements as a progression from errancy in extended space to an internalized war emplaced within the Body Without Organs, as two citations from the Rodez period attest:

It is no longer a question of a voyage to the land of the Tarahumaras or to Ireland, but of a more chaotic and dramatic voyage, which, for not embracing the geographic convulsions of a terrestrial sphere in the northern center or in the Occident only better translates the genetic spasms of a thought in full formation, in full essence, at this crucial point . . . where the soul burns like a country that is dislocated in every sense by Barbarian invasions and these Barbarians (Barbares) are desires-passions, internal psychic states . . .

(XV 11)

. . . being man he must walk in space, dammit yes! . . . but since he is the digest [condensé] of the body that brings space back to his body he can live within himself without space and in the absolute void

(XX 358-59; cited in Mèredieu 36)

The first citation (December 1946) historicizes Artaud's case by reminding the reader that his reterritorialization onto his singular body was a retreat from global chaos in the aftermath of World War II. The word condensé foregrounds, in turn, Artaud's voyage in the internal void as a textual appropriation, rewriting, or digestion of all the divergent cultural texts that enabled his access to the geo-graphic—à la lettre—world. Proper names function, according to Deleuze and Guattari, to "identify races, peoples and persons [and/or "cultures, gods"] with regions, thresholds and effects in a production of intensive qualities" (1983, 86). For Artaud, however, proper names and texts are interchangeable, and the situation they intensify is not as optimistic as Anti-Oedipus would have it in that Artaud's situation betrays a hysterical and hyperbolic denial of his debt to foreign texts:

For I am, as every one knows, this great genius,    and he who says it,    he who wrote,    not the Kaballah,    the Popol-Vuh,    the Brahma-Putra,    the Kame-Yoni    and Ji ni ini ini    of all the imputed yogis

(IV 32)

The signifier "Brahma-Putra," unlike "Kaballah...