Artaud Antonin Van Gogh the Suicide Provoked by Society

8/13/2019 Artaud Antonin Van Gogh the Suicide Provoked by Society

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N T O N I N R T U D

V A N G O G H T H E SU IC ID EP R O V O K E D BY SOCIETYWEmay talk about the good mental health of Van Gogh, who,during his whole life in this world we live in, burnt only one handn addition to cutting off his left ear.However heartbreakmg it may appear, contemporary life

preserves itself in i ts old atmosphere of lechery, anarchy, disorder,delirium, dissoluteness, chronic madness, bourgeois inertia, psychicanomaly (for it is not man but the world which has becomeabnormal), deliberate dishonesty, flagrant hypocrisy, sordidcontempt of everything which shows distinction, laying claimto a whole order founded on the fulfilmentof primitiveinjustice-an order of organized crime, in fact. Everythmg is going badlybecause at this moment the morbid conscience has an essentialinterest in not recovering from its own sickness. And so a vicioussociety has invented psychiatry to defend itself from the investi-gations of certain superior lucid minds whose intuitive powerswere disturbing to it.No, Van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were Greektorches, atomic bombs whose angle of vision, in distinction to allthe other aintings existing at the time, would have been capableEmpire bourgeoisie and of the police spies of Thiers, Gambetta,FClix-Faure, as well as those of Napoleon 111. For Van Gogh spainting does not attack a certain conformity of convention somuch as the conformity of institutions. Institutions disintegrateon the social level; and medical science, by asserting Van Gogh smadness, shows itself to be an unserviceable, irresponsible corpse.Psychiatry, challenged by Van Gogh s lucidity at work, is nomore than an outpost of,gorillas, themselves obsessed and perse-cuted,. who have only a ridiculous terminology to alleviate themost a p p a h g states of anguish and human suffocation: a fittingproduct of their disreputable brains.

of serious y upsetting the grub-like conformity of the Second


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VAN GOGH 7an Gogh s body, free from all sin, was also free from thatmadness which is only induced by sin. And I do not believe inCatholic sin but I do believe in erotic crime. It is precisely the

world s geniuses and authentic lunatics in the asylums who areinnocent of this crime; and if they are not, it is because they arenot (authentically) lunatics.

And what is an authentic lunatic?He is a man who has preferredto become what is socially understood as mad rather than forfeita certain superior idea of human honour. In its asylums, societyhas managed to strangle all those it has wished to rid itself of orto defend itself from, because they refused to make themselvesaccomplices to various flagrant dishonesties. For a lunatic is also aman whom society has not wished to listen to, and whom it isdetermined to prevent from uttering unbearable truths. But insuch a case, internment is not its only weapon, and the socialcollectivity has other means to subdue those minds it wishes tosuppress. Apart from the trifling influences of the small-townwitch doctors, there are the vast onsets of world-wide spells,participated in from time to time by the totality of alarmedconscience. By these means the universal conscience, duringwar, a revolution or a potential social upheaval, is called inquestion, interrogates itself and passes its judgements. It can alsobe provoked and brought out of itself in the case of certain sensa-tional individual examples. There have been the unanimousoutbreaks with regard to Baudelaire, Edgar Poe, Gtrard deNerval, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Holderlin and Coleridge-andthere has also been one about Van Gogh.The few lucid, well-disposed people who have had to struggleon this earth, see themselves at certain hours of the day and nightfrom the depths of various phases of authentic recollected night-mare, overwhelmed by the powerful suction of the formidable,tentacle-like oppression of a kind of civic bewitchment whchsoon openly expresses itself in the general conventions. In com-parison with this universal filth based on sex on one hand and onmass or some such other psychic ritual on the other, there is nomadness in walking around at night in a hat fitted with twelvecandles in order to paint a landscape on the spot. As for the burnthand, that was pure and simple heroism. The cut-off ear wasstraightforward logic. I repeat: a world which every day andnight increasingly eats the uneatable in order to adapt its bad faith


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8 ORIZONto its own ends is forced, as far as this bad faith is concerned, tokeep it under lock and key.I believe Gauguin thought the artist should look for the symboland the myth and expand everything in life into a myth, whereasVan Gogh thought that we must know how to infer the mythfrom the most everyday things in life. For reality is greatlysuperior to every story, mythology, deity and super-reahty. Itis enough to have the genius to know how to interpret reality,which is something no painter had done before Van Gogh.

Van Gogh had reached that stage in illumination when thoughtflows back on itself in disorder.It is the tendency of superior personalities, always one step

beyond reality, to explain everything through their own badconscience, to believe that nothing is ever due to chance, and thatall the evil which occurs happens as a result of conscious, shrewdand deliberate bad will: an opinion which psychiatrists neverhold and which geniuses always believe.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modelled, con-structed, or invented anythmg, except in order to extricatehimself from hell.

will tell you that Van Gogh is a painter because he has re-assembled nature, because he has, as it were, perspired it andmade it sweat, because he has spurted on to his canvases in heaps,monumental with colours, the centuries-old struggle of elements,the terrible rudimentary pressure of apostrophes, stripes, commasand strokes, of which we must admit that after hm, naturalappearances are made.And how many repressed elbow movements, ocular shocksrecorded from life, observations made in front of the subject,luminous currents of the forces which work on reality, werenecessary to overthrow the barrier before being finally com-pressed, raised on to the canvas and accepted

There are no ghosts in Van Gogh s painting, nq visions, nohallucinations. It is the torrid truth of the sun at two o clock inthe afternoon. But the suffering of the pre-natal is there.


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V A N O H 9It is nature pure and naked seen just as it conceals itself whenwe know how to get near enough to it.

remember his cornfield: ear upon ear and that is all with afew little thin-sown poppy-heads in the foreground bitterly andnervously applied there knowingly and passionately dotted andslashed.

Van ogh will have surely been the most genuine p inter oca11the painters the only one who has not exceeded painting in sofar as painting is both the strict means of his work and the strictlimit of his means. On the other hand he is absolutely the onlypainter who has completely exceeded painting as the passiveact of representing nature in order to pour out from this exclusiverepresentation of nature a whirlpool force an element torn outof the hearts centre.Nothing but painting-no more: no philosophy mysticismritual psycliurgy or litur y no business with literature nor with

Better than any psychiatrist in the world this is how the greatVan Gogh has described his illness: I break through I lose againexamine grip hold of I loosen my dead life conceals nothing

and besides the nlunt has never done any harm to anyone andwhat forces me to return to it is this distressing sense of absencewhich passes by and sometimes drowns me but I see veryclearly into it; and I even know what the nlunt is and I couldtell you what is in it.Van Gogh was right. One can live for the infinite only takepleasure in the infinite; there is enough infinite on the earth andin the stars to satiate a thousand great geniuses. If Van Gogh wasunable to gratify his desire to suffuse his whole life with it it isbecause society expressly and consciously forbade him.

poetry: these bronzed go den sunflowers are painted.

R

No one is alone any more in dying. But in the case of suicidean army of. wicked people is necessary to induce the body tothat gesture against nature of depriving itself of its own heart.Van ogh was dispatched from the world first by his brothertelling him of the birth of his nephew and then by Dr. Gachetwho one day instead of advising m est and isolation sent


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S H O R I Z O Nhim out to paint in the open when he really felt that Van Goghwould have done better to go and rest.

For you cannot so immediately oppose a lucidity and sensibilityof such a quality as that of the martyred an Gogh.

There are some temperaments who on certain days wouldlull themselves for a simple contradiction; and for such a thing tohappen there is no need to be a marked and listed madman.On the contrary it is enough to be in good health and to haveright on ones side.

In a simdar case I w ll no longer put up with hearing someonesay to me as has s often happened Monsieur Artaud you areraving without committing a crime.

an Gogh heard this said to him.And ths is why that knot of blood which U e d h m twisted

itself around his throat.[Excerpts from Van Gogh l Suicide e la Socied, t be published byEditions K Paris %Utsh d by PETER W TSON]

G R A H A M H O U G HNOVELIST-PHILOSOPHERS-XI1

GEORGE EL IOTN o w that the last relics of traditional England have just aboutdisappeared and fewer and fewer people have any idea evenimaginatively of what it was l l about such pictures of it as wepossess are beginning to acquire an almost archaological interest.It is surprising on investigation to find how unreliable many ofthe pictures are. I dont mean to repeat that Jane Austen took nonotice of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; heresurely she was entirely just. To take no notice of convulsions inforeign parts till someone actually comes and drops somethingon you is one of the most permanent English characteristics butif her sdnes de la vie e province m s s out as they do the farmingthe horse-coping the politics and the class relations not much isleft of the actual preoccupationsof the time. Dickens too; manyof is social types are the offspring not of observation but of the

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Artaud Antonin Van Gogh the Suicide Provoked by Society