From Schizophrenia to Schizophonica: Antonin Artaud's To Have Done with the Judgment of God

Nobody in Europe knows how to scream any more. – Antonin Artaud

What does it really mean, "To hear death in his voice?" How can one attain the impossible narrative position established from the point of view of one's own death? In 1933 Antonin Artaud gave a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled "Le Théâtre et la peste" ("The Theater and the Plague"), which was to become a chapter of his masterpiece, Le Théâtre et son double (The Theater and Its Double). His presentation is described by Anaïs Nin:

But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted on the platform of the Sorbonne.... His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion.

This extremely disturbing scene may serve as our prolegomenon to a consideration of a later disruption of our aesthetic field, Artaud's Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God), his final work and major radiophonic creation.

Artaud's internment in psychiatric institutions – where he suffered a spiritual, symbolic, metaphysical "death," as he so often claimed – corresponded with the duration of the Second World War. Perhaps the terrible manifestations of war – the shrieks of sirens, screams, shattered and dismembered bodies, the explosions of bombs, innumerable ways to die – already evident in Artaud's theater, were displaced by Artaud once again, expressed both in his subsequent aesthetic mannerisms as well as in the more immediate and morbid symptoms of his illness. His behavior in the asylum was characterized by delusions, auditory hallucinations, repetitive ritualistic acts, coprophilia, glossolalia, and uncontrollable violent tantrums. The therapeutic response was equally violent: electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy. (Electroshock therapy, creating violent convulsions of the body, was developed in Rome in 1938; insulin shock therapy, which puts the body in a comatose state, was developed in Vienna in 1933.) These tortures, in addition to his confinement (under extremely difficult wartime conditions), his total dispossession (all of his personal belongings, including several objects of highly symbolic value, were stolen), and his internal psychic torments, all resulted in his understanding of his situation as an imitatio Christi, which was at the very center of his theologically oriented paranoia.

Artaud returned to Paris in 1946 a physically broken man. (This is strikingly apparent in a comparison of photographs of Artaud taken before and during his incarceration.) Finally, his condition was mortally aggravated by a long-undiagnosed terminal rectal cancer. (When this condition was finally discovered, it was too late for treatment, and the diagnosis was withheld from Artaud, as it often was in such cases, due to the vilification and fear of cancer in that epoch. Yet given Artaud's extreme sensitivity to his body, and given the terrible pain caused by this disease, he must have known the gravity of his condition.) The manner in which cancer has been stigmatized in our century is investigated by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor: it is ill-omened, abominable, repugnant, desexualizing, corrosive, corrupting, parasitic; it is a revolt of the organs, metaphorized as demonic possession or as demonic pregnancy; cancer is, ultimately, a disease that cannot be aestheticized, and to name it is an incitement to violence. It is thus a fortiori a perfect disease for paranoids, where in Artaud's case it would not be too extreme an analogy to liken his cancer to the parasitic God with which he struggled during his confinement in the psychiatric institutions.

Would it be too extravagant to suggest the electric shocks that traversed and convulsed his body were countered with electric "shocks" of his own: a radiophonic transmission? The redemptive quality of such a work cannot be overlooked, nor can its role as psychic overcompensation for his previous isolation, suffering, and position as an outcast: in contrast to the demonic voices that had tormented him, he can now broadcast and thus orally universalize his passions, his art, and his cultural critique. (It would thus be a misconception to read the viciously anti-American opening passages of To Have Done with the Judgment of God as a political statement, especially given Artaud's antipolitical rhetoric, articulated as early as in his polemic against the Surrealists.)

In November 1947 Fernand Pouey, director of dramatic and literary broadcasts for French radio, commissioned Antonin Artaud to create a recorded work for his series La Voix des poètes, to be broadcast on Radiodiffusion française. This was the origin of Artaud's final work, To Have Done with the Judgment of God. In May 1946 Artaud returned to Paris after nine years of incarceration in insane asylums, where during the last sixteen months at Rodez he produced the Cahiers de Rodez (15-21), notebooks documenting the deliria of those years, as well as the material, psychological, and spiritual conditions of his confinement. He returned a sort of tragic poet laureate, whose public celebration took place on 13 January 1947 as the famous lecture/poetry reading that he gave at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, attended by many of the most notable figures of the French cultural scene, including Gide, Camus, and Breton. Here he transfixed the audience – not by reading, as planned, the poems contained in Histoire vécue d'Artaud-Mômo, the texts of which were interspersed with his idiosyncratic glossolalic outbursts and incantations, but by breaking down under the force of his own emotions. This period also saw the creation of Van Gogh le suicidé de la société (Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society), which, as we shall see, evoked Artaud's estimation of his own treatment by society and prefigured his own fate.

To Have Done with the Judgment of God was recorded in the studios of French radio between 22 and 29 November 1947, with the sound effects recorded later and added to the final...