Antonin Artaud's Writing Bodies (review)

Adrian Morfee examines Artaud's writing in terms of the progressive development of a conceptual system, insisting on Artaud's building of meaning-giving structures in his writing. He takes the reader through the different phases of Artaud's thought, from the early Surrealist texts, in which Artaud begins to build his vision of linguistic and subjective aridity, through the writings on the hieroglyphic body of theatre and on to the Gnostic Artaud, his subsequent rejection of God and elaboration of a vampirized, effluvial body and lastly, to the dessicated 'corps sans organes' of the late texts. The real success of the book lies in its recovery of Artaud from the margins of Western thought, and its defence of his writing as something more than an assault on Western thought modes. Morfee takes issue with a number of Artaud's critics, arguing against readings that present the writings as undifferentiated expositions of the pain of psychosis, as failed texts to be unscrambled or as instances of a particular mode of metaphysical thinking. Whilst acknowledging the influential nature of Derrida's theoretical readings of Artaud, the author contends that Derrida's account loses sight of the texts, crediting Artaud with too much philosophy. According to Morfee, Artaud is simply not as smoothly coherent as Derrida made him look. This book shows, through meticulous analysis of the muscle of the writing body evident in the late writings in particular, that what Artaud seeks is not the destruction of dualist metaphysics, but pure creation. In its glossolalia, its paratactic fragments, its multiplication of enunciative positions, its syntactic and semantic disruption and its intensive repetitions, Artaud's poetic writing, according to Morfee, forces the reader to engage both eye and ear in a performance of the motility of the writing body. It is not only on the stage, but also — and even primarily—on the page that 'the play-offs between eye and ear take place' (111). The ultimate aim of this project is the generation, through writing, of an alternative identity that would be non-representational, and it is this that gives rise to the near illisibilité of the late writing, a sign of its authenticity for Artaud: 'Car les mots sont cacophonie et la grammaire les arrange mal, la grammaire qui a peur du mal parce qu'elle cherche toujours le bien, le bien être, quand le mal est la base de l'être' (p. 149). Maintaining his focus on the specifics of the writing itself, Morfee argues that there is a genuine, if uneven, process of intellectual development evident in the mutating patterns that emerge when the different phases of Artaud's thought are read with an eye to — and empathy with — the details of their incoherences. But it is in his insistence on Artaud's reinjection of literarity into the heart of existential crisis that he is most compelling. Morfee's book is an excellent guide for the reader wishing to find ways into the late texts, ways of reading Artaud's extravagantly inventive record of his writing body's battle with 'the loss that occurs in telling' (p. 213).