Sub Rosa Antonin Artaud : Pour En Finir avex le Jugement de Dieu (F,1947,re.1996)*****
I insisted reviewing this album, once discovered through the local library. It makes clear that already in 1947 some sonic avant-garde had taken place and was recorded. “How to end with the judgement of the Lord” was meant for radio broadcast late 1947 as a part of a series called “the voice of the poet” of which Antonin Artaud was invited to participate, but already before it was onto the air it was banned. Also a second attempt to air it, with a literature commission featuring lots of writers, including Cocteau, and Paul Eluard, in support of it, the radio director still did not allow it, to which the director of dramatic and literary programmes, Ferdinand Pouey who had done the first invitation, resigned. One last disappointing attempt to present the radio performance to just a few people led Artaud to the conclusion that from now on he would only depend on theatre where the viewer would experience the play as a creative act, a corporal thing on its own. Through the use of sound effects (vocal experiments with bowles percussion) and texts, the play was meant, in his own words, as follows : “I wanted a work that catches organic points in life, a work in which we feel the whole nervous system burning like an incandescent lamp with vibrations, consonance which invite man to go out WITH his body, in pursuit of this new, strange radiant Epiphany in the sky.” … “Anybody, down to the coal merchant, must understand being fed with the filth-physical, as well as physiological, and desires an indepth corporal change.” It is especially through reading about his life and works I began to fully grasp the whole purpose and content of the piece well. The whole expression contains for sure some anger in the expressions, of which anger itself and madness is already seen as a threat, especially when combined with criticism of the American way of life and breaking apart the standard Christian values.
I will tell the most important facts and events that caused the form creative expression of which this play is also a summary of his experiences (even more details will confirm the same results). At the age of 4 he suffered from meningitis, giving him a irritable temperament, and vulnerable nervous system. He became angry with the decadent side of Society and gave some lectures about it in Mexico. There he had experienced peyote which gave him some deeper supernatural experience which must have remained with him longer. Also the play he says should work as a 'theatre of blood', which can be experienced corporaly, with an experience of change through this body of which theatre as its exponent. The Mexicans lived through a cruel ritual of blood, but at the same time this was related with the experience of how consciousness from a bodily expression could be experienced most directly. One of his most important manifestos is about his “Theater of Cruelty”. This refers not at all to the visual and historical cruelty of these Mexicans, but to a form of experiencing reality he might have learned from this peyote experience and life, a distinction he now could make between true directly confronting reality and the laziness in following a false reality. This cruelty is no blind destructive force, but a determination of the experiences of a false reality by a direct physical experience of gesture, and sound. Comparable in a degree to an animal which just IS and expresses his gestures without falseness, Artaud used effective expressions that could bring over the right consciousness through its expressive physical power. He was so strong with this expression on stage that during a play about the plague the audience hearing the strange sounds and gestures, felt sick. Knowing this background, and with the understanding of the lyrics one can no longer say that the used sound effects parts, are like cacaphony, as I read somewhere. Most people, with this little background and when understanding the lyrics of the play, should be able to grab this. Thanks to an on line translation in English I was able to follow the lyrics closely.
At first it is about certain absurdities in the American way of life, because, he says, it’s approach loses a grip on real life and real things. The same Americans prepare wars, but never confront themselves there either, instead hide behind their machines. They provoke and prepare their wars to win the game of their visions and objects of its sub-nature, in favour of their own economic system, a system also driven away from contact with nature… using also God for it. All this was written in the forties! (Not much seems to have been changed since). Later on the play he will also completely ridicule the thoughts being associated with God and Jesus with clever rhetoric. The first vocal driven sonic part after that makes fun and absurdity of this war game, and sounds like a mixture of a children’s game and a madman’s performance, and is a play with human sounds describing its absurd anger and desires. A great part, revealing things even deeper, is a Plato-like recitation about Consciousness, something which, according to the text, is in reality more generally associated and reflected by desires. It seems that his own form of deeper consciousness is trying to go behind all this nonsense and wants to leave his limiting body, while carrying the listener with his own form of awareness with him. Knowing they wont grasp his deeper feelings, with some anger in the expressions, he tends to make these deepest thoughts a little bit more absurd by frustration, but for me it is clear this piece is the work of a man being very aware of what he was doing and expressing, and this is not the work of a madman, although he must have suffered, also physically. After the rejection of this final and in fact rather conclusive piece, he got cancer and died very soon after. In fact this made him really leave his body, while keeping the consciousness hidden in the recording, not sure how many will be taken with it, in the deeper lying backgrounds..of its consciousness.
Additionally one can realize also that his fragile nervous system made him look desperately for a free expression of a new Body that became his Theatre. While his own consciousness was troubled by his own body, he thoroughly was in a process of liberating his mind from the processes governed by the body. In the meanwhile he realized that the Christian idea of a total separation of Body and Mind was a wrong and imagined interpretation, also because those people who claimed so were still governed by primitive desires and rational falsifications. Through his own painful process his consciousness was especially able to become more physically independent by his creative correspondence in the physical theatre, where his achievements were able to affect people's mind through provocation of rather complete affective reactions, with body and all, by the listeners. On the recording we miss the gestures, but hear the direct sonic experiences mixed with expressive rhetoric which becomes identified within this, already described, driven process.
