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Rating: “I have always liked Mayakovsky. He is like a continuation of Dostoevsky. Or rather, he is a lyric written by one of his most restless characters. […] What an overwhelming talent! How he manages to say everything, once and for all, implacably and absolutely consistently.” (Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago).
I believe in elective affinities, I believe in invisible, imponderable, and inexpressible energies that can firmly lock the path of some men, and I believe in them beyond time and space, language and culture, intellectual path and mystical aspiration. I believe in them because of their steps taken in the world, their acts accomplished in this thing called life (the famous “acts of the apostles” postulated by Henry Miller).
Antonin Artaud was an artist with multifaceted genius. One of the most visionary poets of the 20th century and indisputably one of those “horrible workers” whose birth Arthur Rimbaud hoped for in the famous “Letter of the Seer,” an actor of crystalline talent (his performance in Dreyer's masterpiece, “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” is to be passed on to posterity), a playwright and revolutionary theater theorist who, with his book “The Theater and Its Double,” shook all those stale scenic conventions, all those dusty sediments that had been plaguing the stage for too long.
A man of innumerable and incalculable artistic resources, also afflicted by a violent and incurable schizophrenic syndrome that led to a period of internment at the Rodez clinic lasting 9 years, during which he underwent approximately 48 (forty-eight!) sessions of electroshock.
Van Gogh, well…Van Gogh certainly needs no introduction, but I would like to add a small postscript; among all the things you know about him, add this: Antonin Artaud was undoubtedly one of his most authentic blood brothers.
This thing, the French Master always felt, and he felt it not vaguely or indirectly, but it was imprinted in his flesh, in the spasms of his muscles, in the bile he vomited on the world.
When they brought him an article by a psychiatrist that talked about Vincent from the mere pathological side, Artaud, in the last year of his life, decided to write an essay that rehabilitated the Dutch Master not only in artistic terms but, above all, in human terms, showing that the enlightened Van Gogh was “simply” subjugated by the inertia force of an obtuse bourgeois society that, not accepting and not understanding what he was striving to communicate, “Erased in him the supernatural consciousness he had just assumed, and, like a flood of black crows in the fibers of his internal tree, overwhelmed him with one last shock and, taking his place, killed him, suicide him.”
Exactly, suicide him. “It penetrated his body, this absolved, consecrated, sanctified and possessed society” and, through an unconscious collective magical rite, suicide him. It didn’t lead him to suicide, it suicide him.
Did I say this book is an essay? No, it isn’t. And for various reasons.
This book is a transfusion of bile; it is the last roar of a beast mercilessly hunted that, in its final spasm of pain, literally opens its belly showing us the truth of its bloodied entrails, of its dark blood staining the ground.
No, it is not an essay. It is a visionary speaking of another visionary, and he does so with disconcerting clarity, with a violence and illumination that no other book on Van Gogh could ever reach: “Van Gogh had reached that stage of enlightenment in which disorderly thought recedes before invasive discharges and in which thinking is no longer exhausting oneself, and simply is no more, and where there is nothing left but to gather bodies, I mean GATHER BODIES.”
No, it is definitely not just an essay. It is a superhuman accusation to this world where “one eats every day baked vagina in green sauce or flayed and incited newborn sex to rage,” an insane and demented world that dared to judge Van Gogh insane simply because he did not fit into its hypocritical and wicked ranks.
The accusation is not political or social, but, as always in Artaud’s writings, much more radical. Van Gogh was the sacrificial victim of a magical rite in which society, to protect itself and its senseless order, “Has a vital interest in not emerging from its own disease. That’s how a defective society invented psychiatry to defend itself from the investigations of certain superior lucid minds whose divinatory faculties annoyed it.”
Do you know what this book is? It is an exorcism. A desperate act of liberation, of purification, the evacuation from one’s own body of all those rotten, diabolical, putrescent, and dumb energies that possessed Van Gogh’s body and that suicide him. Energies that Artaud also felt within himself.
Just as Pasternak felt that Mayakovsky was an emanation of Dostoevsky's work, Artaud speaking about Van Gogh has the same effect as a character detaching from the canvas and talking to us about the world he lives in, the world re-created by the Dutch Master.
It seems that Van Gogh’s last words, those said just before dying, were “Now I want to go back.” Go back where? Artaud seems to be the only one who approached the mystery.
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