"Artaud's Surreal Dalai-Lama."
Isabelle Gros
2127 Au Sable Hall
Grand Valley State University
1 Campus Drive
Allendale, MI 49401
+1 616 895 2477
grosi@gvsu.edu
In Artaud's Collected Works, in the first volume, one finds two Addresses
to the Pope and two Addresses to the Dalai-Lama. The first volume is divided
into two volumes of which the first one contains Artaud's second "Address to the
Dalai-Lama" dated October 1st, 1946 and signed by him, Antonin Artaud. The
second volume includes Artaud's first "Address to the Dalai-Lama." This text
which comes first chronologically but second in the presentation of the Collected
Works was included in the number 3 of the first year of the revue La Révolution
Surréaliste dated April 15, 1925, and it was unsigned because it was meant to be
a collective manifesto. This first text however was entirely written by Artaud
although the title in the manuscript was from the hand of André Breton. The
editors of the Collected Works remark that it seems that Artaud replaced the
word "letter" by "address." The emphasis wanted by Artaud was to make these
addresses "formal communications" (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary), that is to
say prepared speeches meant to be performed out loud, texts written in the
direction of addressees, and prepared for a virtual oral delivery. Artaud was the
director of the third number of La Révolution Surréaliste and was also the one
who wanted to write these addresses, and it was he who chose to whom they
would be directed. It is significant that he wrote these Addresses to the Pope, and
the Dalai-Lama, and also the "Letter to the Schools of the Buddha" in 1925, and
chose to re-write them or at least to write new Addresses to the Pope and the
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Dalai-Lama in 1946 so that these second Addresses could be included in his
Collected Works. Artaud gave very special importance to his new Addresses to
the Pope and the Dalai-Lama because (according to the editors "these addresses
together with the Preamble were a manner of introduction to his Collected works
destined, he said, to re actualize the debate.” (tome 1, vol. 1 p.271) He sent his
new "Address to the Pope" on December 2nd, 1946 and wrote: "I join to this letter
to the Pope an address to the Dalai-Lama which must come after my letter to the
Pope, after which the first tome of my Collected Works will be wrapped up and
completely-WRAPPED-UP!" (p.271) These last two words were underlined, the
first one once and the second one twice. By these addresses, Artaud felt that he
was drawing his works to a close, a closure, a final fullness that was satisfying to
him. Therefore the prevalence he gives to these second addresses forces us to
read them carefully and to contrast them with the first addresses of 1925.
Because Artaud addressed the Pope first, it is fitting to analyze these first
two addresses. The tone of the second "Address to the Pope" is extremely violent
and blasphemous. It starts with four points:
1) I renounce baptism.
2) I shit on the Christian name.
3) I whack off on the cross of god (but whacking off (masturbation)
Pie XII has never been a habit of mine, and it will never be. Maybe,
you will have to start to understand me.)
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4) It is I (and not Jesus-Christ) who was crucified at the Golgotha,
and I was crucified for standing up against god and his Christ.
Because I am a man, and god and his Christ are only ideas which
carry, by the way, the dirty mark of the hand of man; and these
ideas have never existed for me... (My translation. vol. 1, tome 1,
p.13)
Artaud opposes man, himself as a body to god, a man-made idea.
In The
fragments of a Diary from Hell, Artaud explains what being a man meant to him:
“I am a man by my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach
whose knots rejoin me at the putrefaction of life.” (Œuvres Complètes, tome 1,
vol.1, p117)
He accuses Christians of having made and redone Jesus-Christ and writes
that the present Pope Pie XII has this "movement... in the throat and in the nose,
especially while saying mass... [and that he] does not stop fornicating an
anathema (that by god may my semen be) between the plexus and the gut.
“(p.14)
But he adds that the real reason why he writes to the Pope is because "he
knows who he is" and that "he and the congregation of the saint-office have a lot
to do with his arrest... having been in imprisonment in Dublin and spending nine
years of internment in France.” (p.14) Artaud goes on to explain that "the reasons
he was arrested, interned and poisoned from September 1937 to May 1946 are
exactly the reasons why he was arrested, flagellated and crucified... in Jerusalem
a little more than 2,000 years ago." He was hated 2000 years ago only because he
was Antonin Artaud and he insists that this was his name then as it is now. The
real name of Jesus-Christ was Antonin Artaud because, in making creation, God
has divided himself causing in that way the crucifixion of Artaud who has
always felt dissociated and detached from being. Of his daily crucifixion, Artaud
had written in The Fragments of a Diary from Hell: "There is something which is
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higher than all human activity: this is the example of this monotonous
crucifixion, this crucifixion in which the soul destroys itself without end."
(Selected Writings, p.95) As Florence de Mèredieu writes:
When Artaud identifies himself to the being and the name of God-Jesus-Christ, "Jizi-Cri," "Ji-Ji Cri-Cri," "Jaisu-Kriss"--, it is to enter
into him and remake himself in him; in fact, it is about taking the
place of god, going back to the principle, destroying everything and
starting everything anew." (Voyages, p.130)
In his second "Address to the Dalai-Lama," Artaud will make another reference
to Jesus-Christ whom he calls then "jiji-cricri" saying that "the precession of
equinoxes" had been stolen by Christ from the Lamas but that it was not worth "a
simple aioli" prepared by him, Artaud. The making of creation by God does not
even have the value of a simple recipe prepared by Artaud because God did
everything wrong, he has taken the place of man in order to exist. Derrida
explains what difference within flesh means for Artaud in "La Parole soufflée":
My body has been stolen from me by effraction. The Other, the
Thief, the great furtive One, has a proper name: God. His history
has taken place. It has its own place. The place of effraction can be
only the opening of an orifice. The orifice of birth, of defecation to
which all other gaps refer, as if to their origin. (Writing and
Difference. p.180)
Artaud writes that he was poisoned to death and died in 1940 but that if
he died on the cross 2,000 years ago this time his consciousness and the manes of
the dead man that he is will not be appeased until he has cooked the Pope with
his dick in the air--that is head down-- in the Saint Peter Altar in Rome--just like
Saint Peter who is often represented crucified head down. Artaud ends his
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address by a threat to the Pope whom he wants to burn and cook, torture, just
like he, Artaud, feels that he has been martyrized because of the Pope.
In the first "Address to the Pope" of 1925 which is much shorter, Artaud
addresses the Pope in an informal manner, using the "tu" form while he uses a
formal form in the second address. It seems that after his stay at the asylum,
Artaud addresses even his friend Pierre Brasseur with the formal "vous" because
he writes: "the "tutoiement" (informal address) since my 3 years of being put to
the secret at the beginning of my internment is linked for me to the idea of such
police promiscuities, with very bad spirits, that I was no longer able to use it with a
friend." (In a letter dated May, 5, 1947, published in Le Magazine Littéraire, April
1984, p.32)
As in the second address, he urges the Pope to understand him or more
exactly to understand them because he speaks in the name of the Surrealist
group. He writes that "the Confessional is not, he, the Pope, but them, the
Surrealists." They do not need any intermediary between themselves and their
soul because: "Here the spirit confesses itself to the spirit." (Vol. 1, tome 2 p. 41)
What characterizes the Pope and his church is the "hatred of the immediate
truths of the soul." Artaud opposes "being in the world"--a world which is the
"abyss of the soul"-- and where the Pope is confined, being himself outside the
soul, (compared) to the situation of the Surrealists who "are not of the world."
Previously in a letter to Jacques Rivière dated May 25, 1924, Artaud had written
explaining his disease: "This lack of connection to the object which characterizes
all of literature is in me a lack of connection to life. As for myself I can truly say
that I am not in this world, and this is not merely an attitude of the mind."
(Antonin Artaud Selected Writings, New York: Farrar, 1976, p.44) In that letter,
he had made a difference between his "not being in the world" and the
Surrealists' way of not being in the world emphasizing mainly that he was
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affected by a disease that had damaged his soul and that the Surrealists "do not
suffer and that [he] suffer[s], not only in the mind but in the flesh and in [his]
everyday soul." (Selected Writings, p.44) However, in the "Address to the Pope,"
no distinction is made and both Artaud and the Surrealists as a group are said to
be out of the world while we know it had a special significance for Artaud and is
perhaps what characterizes him most. In a word, Artaud's Address is a
declaration of war to the Pope. He asks the Pope to leave them alone "to swim in
their bodies," to leave "their souls be in their souls," ending the letter by the final
dismissal: "we have no need of your knife of clarity"
In his 1925 "Address to the Dalai-Lama," Artaud also uses the informal
"tutoiement" but the tone of his text is quite different. It sounds like a prayer, an
appeal to "an acceptable Pope" who is asked to use a language understandable to
their "contaminated spirits of Europeans." Artaud does not ask the Dalai-Lama to
understand them but to become intelligible to them. It is a plea, a supplication:
Change our Spirit; make us a spirit completely turned toward the
perfect heights where the Spirit of Man does not suffer any longer.
Make us a spirit without habits, a spirit truly frozen in the Spirit, or
a Spirit with purer habits, yours, if they are good for freedom.
(Tome 1, vol. p.42)
Artaud criticizes the environment in which they are forced to live where people
are "dogs, who think immediately with the earth, who think hopelessly in the
present."(p.42) Artaud does not believe that true life is limited to the one we are
experiencing now. He speaks of "his eternal life" in many of his writings such as
this one:
The memories of my eternal life do not go up only to this present
existence but, to a few others. And if in this life I went through
Marseille, Smyrne, Le Havre, Lyon, Lourdes, Paris, Rome, Berlin,
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Mexico, Brussels, Dublin, Le Havre, Rouen and Rodez, I went
through Nazareth and Jerusalem 2000 years ago where I lived for a
few years. (Oeuvres Complètes, Tome XIV, p.70)
Artaud requests the Dalai-Lama to "teach them the material levitation of bodies
and how they could no longer be imprisoned by the earth." The Dalai-Lama is
told that he knows all too well which "transparent liberation of the souls, to
which freedom of the Spirit in the Spirit... they allude to." Artaud desires an
"organic culture"--such as the one he thought the Tarahumaras of Mexico
possessed-- which is to say a unitary culture where man would be reunified, his
body and his soul corresponding completely to each other, the body being only
the form of the soul. (cf. Mèredieu, Les Couilles de l'ange, p.41) In the last
paragraph, Artaud speaks in his name only, using the first person singular
instead of the first person plural, to conclude that it is "with the eye of the inside"
that he looks at the Dalai-Lama to whom he gives the name of "Pope of the inside
height." The whole text is a beautiful prayer addressed to the Tibetan Buddhist
leader, the expression of a hope that there is a different, acceptable spiritual path
that could help Artaud, the Surrealists and those who like them declare "the end
of the Christian era"--this is the title of the third number of La Révolution
Surréaliste-- uplift their spirit and their bodies in a place beyond which
transcends "idea" and "renunciation to idea," where freedom of the Spirit united
to the body can be found. Included in the third number of La Révolution
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Surréaliste was also another letter directed to "the Schools of the Buddha" and
also entirely written by Artaud. Amazingly enough this letter was translated by
Stephen Bachelor--a noted Tibetan scholar-- and published in the winter 1995
issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review in a section entitled Ancestors. Can
Artaud be considered an ancestor of today's American Buddhists? This is
questionable, but in his interest for Tibet he was preceded by other French poets
such as Victor Segalen. In this publication, the introduction to the letter states
that "Artaud's "Letter" is less an espousal of Buddhist ideas than the expression
of dissatisfaction with the materialism of modern society."(p.13) Certainly this
cannot be denied in a letter which asserts that modern progress cannot be of any
benefit to the soul. "It is from other needs that our spirit suffers than those
inherent to life. We suffer from rottenness (corruption), from the rottenness of
Reason." Artaud sees a community of opinion with the Schools of Buddhism
which do not value progress and call on them to tear down the white men's
houses and build them new ones. But if he sees hope in a religion seeking to cure
human suffering, his letter is an invitation to destroy logic and liberate the spirit.
Already, the introduction to the third number of La Révolution Surréaliste
entitled "A table" ("Come and eat!") invites the readers to:
leave the caverns of being. Come. The spirit breathes outside the
spirit. It is time to abandon your homes. Give in to the All-Thought.
The Marvelous is at the root of the spirit.
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We are from the inside of the spirit, of the inside of the head. Ideas,
logic, order, Truth (with a capital T), Reason, we give all to the
nothingness of death. Be careful with your logic, Sirs, beware of
your logic, you do not know until where our hatred of logic can
lead us.
The war against logic is a war against the Pope, the Christian church, a dialectical
thinking that opposes good to evil, that uses words with capitals such as "God,
Bible or Gospel" to stop the spirit. (cf. "Address to the Pope": There is no God,
Bible or Gospel, there are no words which stop the spirit.") Speaking of his own
words and the limitation of language, Artaud wrote that words or terms are but
endings that limit an ever-moving thought process.
I am truly LOCALIZED by my terms, and if I say that I am
LOCALIZED by my terms, I mean that I do not recognize them as
valid in my thought. I am truly paralyzed by my terms, by a series
of terminations. (Selected Writings, The Nerve Meter, p.83)
Therefore, words being terminations, they are dead and lead nowhere, just like
logic and "all writing is garbage" (Selected Writings, The Nerve Meter, p.85
Significantly, two pages after the addresses to the Pope and the DalaiLama located on pages 16 and 17 facing each other--they occupy the center of the
publication which counts 31 pages total--there is an article by Theodore Lessing
entitled "Europe and Asia" which in turn precedes the "Letter to the Schools of
the Buddha." In this article, Lessing opposes an Orient venerating:
Men who have absolutely done nothing, accomplished nothing,
written nothing, but who like Buddha or LaoTse, lived from all
their senses in the contemplation of the living immutable: still,
saints, without A CONDUCT IN EXISTENCE, without actions.
While we [Europeans], we find our justification, even often our
excuse in activity. (p.21)
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Finally, on the last page of the revue, one finds the report on the "Activity of the
Bureau of Surrealist Researches" written and signed by Artaud which starts with
these words:
The fact of a surreal revolution in things is applicable to all the
states of the spirit/mind,
to all the types of human activity,
to all the states of the world in the middle of the mind,
to all the established facts of morality,
to all the orders of the spirit/mind. (p.31)
And it ends with this sentence which summarizes Artaud's opinion and hopes at
that time:
In the name of his interior freedom, of the exigencies of his peace,
of his perfection, of his purity, he [the surrealist] spits on you,
world given away to the drying reason, to the muddling mimicry
of the centuries, and which has built your houses of words and
established your repertories of precepts where it is no longer
possible that the surreal spirit explodes, the only one worth
uprooting us. (p.31)
In this text already the root of the quarrel which will oppose Artaud to the
Surrealists in 1927 is apparent: for Artaud there is no valid material revolution,
and as he writes in his text Point final meant to put an end to his dispute with
Breton and his friends who had chosen to become communists: "The Revolution
is spiritual by essence. Life does not interest me." (Magazine Littéraire, February
1972 no 61, p.27) He explains that for him "true revolution is a question of the
mind," "an individual affair" and that "the true aim of surrealism was really the
inner conditions of the soul, which are still only the first degree of the final
liberation" and that "true freedom is within us but it has been corrupted/rotted
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by adverse forces which we are profoundly incapable of unraveling." (ML no 61,
p.29 and note no. 3)
For a long time, Artaud will look up to the Himalaya as a place of "inside
height" ("Address to the Dalai-Lama", 1925). He will even identify himself as "I
am Mr. Antonin Artaud of the Himalaya..." (Oeuvres Complètes, tome XX, p.361)
As Florence de Mèredieu reports, in Rodez, at the beginning of 1945, as the
possibility of a departure from the asylum becomes apparent, Artaud thinks of a
final trip to the Orient, to Tibet or Afghanistan. Later that year, on August 17, he
speaks of "undertaking a long trip to Tibet where he would stay and from which
he would not come back to France." (Antonin Artaud: Voyages, pp.41-42) But
Mèredieu also cites another reference to Tibet in Artaud's writings (Oeuvres
Complètes, tome IX, p.211) which illuminates what Tibet meant for him: "To go
to Tibet for me, it is first to crush the Tibet of the soul, the Himalaya of my body
and to make of my body a himalaya where the spirits of hatred will never again
be able to get to." (Voyages, p.40) Tibet and the Himalaya are inner spaces, places
of purity and unity, impregnable fortresses and yet not so much a destination in
the Orient where Artaud longs to travel.
In 1931, after discovering the Balinese theater at the colonial exhibit,
Artaud read the Bardo Thodol, usually referred to as the Tibetan book of the
dead in which a liberation by sound is explained in great detail and we know the
importance he gives to sound and incantation in his theater--in the production of
the Cenci, Artaud used in that way a recording of the great bell of the Chartres
cathedral at the opening of the curtains (Cf. Mèredieu, Les couilles de l'ange,
p.112). However, it seems that his experience of the electroshock therapy in
Rodez which he experienced as a bardo, a death, led him to experience
disillusionment regarding the value of the Tibetan book. In Artaud the Mômo
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(1947) he writes: "... Bardo is death, and death is only a state of black magic which
has not existed for long." (Selected Writings, p.531)
It is clearly disillusionment and bitterness regarding his former "Pope of
the inside height" which are expressed in the second "Address to the Dalai-Lama"
of 1946. This second "Address" is long--three and a half pages--and full of
recriminations. Artaud accuses the Dalai-Lama of having kept his body prisoner,
prisoner of "his libraries... among the innumerable rolls catalogued of the tricks
of being, against him who is not one, but a body submitted to his own law, the
one of his free will." The Lama of Tibet is reproached on "cataloging," "labeling"
and creating a whole list of the sufferings of the body. As such the Tibetans are:
The first-born paragons of a prostitution of the suffering human
light into a light of uncreated abyss which is only an invention of
your under-strap. Under-strap of cowards who have never wanted
to walk. (Tome 1, vol.1, p.18)
Creating libraries, studying the sufferings of being, promising a saving but
inexistent light are the characteristics of a people/a culture refusing "to walk," to
be in the body. Lamas are therefore proponents of logic of words, of writing,
which is no more liberating than the Western Christian logic. Lamas are sorcerers
who have cast a spell on the body of Artaud and took it away from him. It is in
order to violently regain this mistreated and defiled body that Artaud threatens
to go to Tibet.
The strongest insult that Artaud can let out is to call Tibetans or Lamas
"dirty Europeans" and to add that "it is the French spirit in its most odious
manifestations in the worst periods, which has taken refuge on the Himalaya,
and has come back to us, orientalized, well before the entry of the Gaul."(p.18)
Therefore, there is not much difference between the Pope who was already
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strongly attacked in 1925, for representing a system of thought on which the
occidental rational mind is based and the Dalai-Lama who is now accused in 1946
of "being the cause of syllogism, logic, hysteric mysticism, dialectic... ontology...
[and also] the anatomy of stupid mushrooms in which today's man rots." (p.18)
In fact, the responsibility of the Lamas appear even greater because everything
Artaud hates originated from them, including the making of war and peace, wars
fought in Europe without any blood shed in Tibet. The Orient/Tibet becomes the
place of origin, of birth and therefore of horror for Artaud who can no longer
situate himself anywhere, neither in the West nor in the East. The logic and the
dialectic of the lamas make no more sense than the glossopoeias-- that it to say
what he called "the syllables that I invent"-- used in his last works such as To
Have Done with the Judgment of God.
In a gesture of mimicry, Artaud
summarizes the words found in the lamas' writings:
ibi,esprit, perisprit, pan-insprit, par-ago, tant à go, tamichto, ta
pistro, pampita, pra-brahma, par a bo, pa ta pho, para-brah-pitr'a fa
(tome 1, vol.1, p16)
Artaud seems to be casting his own bad spell with words that announce an
upcoming revenge:
Because the result will be paid with your own blood.
100 wars have occurred for 100, 000 years in Europe; and who
realized it in Lhasa.
Which one of your monks has lost a sexual joy or a meal over it?
(p.19)
The indifference of Tibet for the miseries of the rest of the world will have to be
paid for announces Artaud in words which appear prophetic now.
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Artaud's ultimate reproach to the lamas is to possess and control drugs
such as opium, heroin or morphine of which he has been allowed only restricted
amounts and which were necessary for him to control his pain. In retaining for
their own use drugs which he desperately needed to control his disease and
regain the use of his mind, the lamas have sided with Western doctors who have
kept his body imprisoned against his will instead of just giving him the drugs his
mind needed to function. In that way, asking the lamas to give him his body back
is akin to requesting to be freed from the asylum where his body was subjected
to terrible electroshocks. Already in The Umbilicus of Limbo of 1925, is included
a "Letter to the Legislator of the Law of Narcotics," in which Artaud claims that:
"Sick addicts have an inalienable right within society, which is that they be left
the hell alone." (The Umbilicus of Limbo, Selected Writings, p.68) In this letter, he
also explains why opium should not be restricted for sick people like himself: "
There is one thing which you better take into account: that is that opium is that
inviolable and despotic substance which allows those who have had the
misfortune to lose the life of their soul the possibility of recovering it." (Selected
Writings, p.70) Artaud ends his letter by a promise/threat: "It will not pass many
seeds of your last grilled poppy before you see me." (Tome 1, vol.1, p.19)
In conclusion, there is an enormous change of tone between the first and
the second "Address to the Dalai-Lama," between "the Pope of the inside heights"
of 1925 and the "bastard" (saligaud) of 1946. The Pope and the Dalai-Lama have
become two oppressive beings who have caused Artaud's suffering in his body
and soul, and have deprived him of his freedom, a freedom he could have
always retained if he had been given the right medicine, narcotics or opium. His
insistence on putting to trial the Pope and the Dalai-Lama in 1946 might be
clarified by the last but one sentence of the Preamble to his Collected Writings:
"Because it is not ideas but beings who do plop plop in my sexuality, and I will
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not eternally endure that the universal sexuality encase me, and drain me from
head to toe." (Tome 1, vol.1, p.12) In the end, Artaud is left without Orient or
Occident, alone, trying to defend his organic being and excrete his enemies with
his screams, his poetry, and his letters.
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Works Cited.
Artaud, Antonin. Oeuvres Complètes. Paris: Gallimard, Tome I *, 1976 and 1984.
---, Oeuvres Complètes. Paris : Gallimard, Tome I **, 1976.
---, Antonin Artaud Selected Writings. New York: Farrar, 1976.
---, Magazine Littéraire, February 1972, no. 61, p. 27.
---, “Ancestors”, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Winter 1995.
---, La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 1, Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1975.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago : University of Chicago Press,
1978.
Mèredieu, Florence. Voyages. Paris: Blusson, 1992.
---, Les Couilles de l’ange. Paris : Blusson, 1992.
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