https://jacket2.org/commentary/artauds-correspondence-jacques-rivière

from the latest installment on Artaud at Jacket2:

“Still, by arguing for an enactment of a fractured mental state, Artaud is making a case for modernism. These letters, then, along with the poem “Cri,” all of which were eventually published in the Nouvelle Revue Française, are a tremendous set of cultural artifacts. The Romantic ideal is based on assumptions of, to borrow from Delaney again, “the unproblematic transparency between life and language, presentation and representation, intention and effect, and our ability to locate and respond to the ‘parts’ of themselves, as well as a psychological autonomy and a psychological malleability to the subject represented that flies in the face of practically any materialist critique.”[6] Artaud’s work—Artaud’s life—is an attempt to infuse language with the unrealized aspects of life—with the bodily experience of fragmentation.”

https://jacket2.org/commentary/artaud-arrives-paris

Photo: Édouard Toulouse, editor of Demain

From the latest Artaud installment:

A handful of Artaud’s poems were published in Demain including “Night,” which appeared in the issue pictured above, in 1921. In this poem we glimpse a bit of the journal’s ethos, including the advice to approach reading and ideas slowly, a sentiment which Bernard Baillaud situates in opposition “to the rapid reading speed imposed on [the reader]. Far from representing a constraint or form of self-censorship tending to force a choice among the headlines, this method allowed for everything to be read.” Reader as flaneur as slow movement advocate. In “Night,” Artaud declares:

Poet, those things preying on your mind
Have nothing to do with the moon,
The rain is cool
the belly is good.

Deep down in the swollen sheets
Where the whole night breathes,
The poet feels his hair
Proliferate and grow.[4]

Here the poet relishes in the body and pleasure. The slow accretion of time becomes the subject of observation. Imagine how much you’d have to slow down your focus to feel your hair growing. For the review, this calculated pacing was a protection against “hasty and excessive information, from too much empty documentation, and from futility in all walks of life.”[5]