The Asylum of Nonsense: Antonin Artaud's Translation of Lewis Carroll

One of the problems inherent in reading and writing about Artaud's work is being faced with the profound inadequacy of one's language. Artaud's writing confronts us with reams of vitriolic pronouncements against the ability of language to express thought; his later work becomes increasingly studded with clusters of syllables and guttural consonants that do not resemble known words and that dismantle the flow of an otherwise recognizable French. At its most virulent, his language breaks down into cries and screams, while his writing gives way to arcane symbols, scribbled in the margins of his notebooks. This linguistic idiosyncrasy, combined with the fact that Artaud was interned for many years in mental asylums, has, unsurprisingly, had the effect of relegating his most resistant material to the elusive domain that lies at the juncture of the critical and the clinical discourses, loosely characterized by such terms as "unreadability," "untranslatability," and "incurability." Consequently, critics who are faced with Artaud's work typically assume one of two attitudes: either they attempt to decipher the letters that make up his consonantic and vocalic clusters in order to unlock what they perceive to be an esoteric meaning, or they bypass the resistant material with a view to gaining an overarching understanding of Artaud's "themes" from those parts of the texts that remain readable. Both attitudes, however, fail to take into account the nature of the dialogue between readability and unreadability, between meaning and nonmeaning, that is established by Artaud's particular torquing of language. The very structure of the writing-built on a tension between idiolectal aberrations and grammatically correct French forms-prevents us from dismissing Artaud's ostensibly untranslatable utterances as signs of his lapsing into the state of solipsistic self-enclosure that we might associate with madness, but gestures toward an attempt to reach outside and beyond the walls of his private malady. What is significant about this attempt is that it conjoins the sustained destruction of both language and linguistic structures with the implicit program to renew those structures by jolting their users out of their ingrained complacency. Yet how does the demise of language's socially recognizable forms entail its renewal? In what way can communication take place if the medium in which it must occur moves toward the unrepeatability of the untranslatable utterance? The dialogic dimension of Artaud's idiosyncratic idiom can be gauged by observing not only the particular nature of his invented syllables and guttural clusters but also the contextual conditions that fostered their emergence. These syllabic clusters (which have typically been studied in the context of glossolalia-the age-old tradition of speaking in tongues) make their first appearance in Artaud's work during his confinement to the asylum of Rodez (1943-46), and most importantly when he was given a text by Lewis Carroll to translate as an artistic-therapeutic experiment. The text in question is the episode of "Humpty Dumpty" in Through the Looking-Glass (originally published in 1871), in which the eponymous philosopher-egg engages the adventurous heroine Alice in a lively conversation on the topic of the possibility of inventing language and of reassigning meaning to common words, via an impromptu exegesis of the enigmatic poem "Jabberwocky." Yet, the piece that Artaud produced, which was published in 1947 under the title L'Arve et l'Aume and with the provocative subtitle Tentative anti-grammaticale a propos de Lewis Carroll et contre lui, is far from what might be conventionally called a translation; nor does it seem to suggest the success of a therapy designed to curb what was judged to be an internally devolving language. Indeed, the opening lines of L'Arve et l'Aume leave the reader uneasy--unsure of both the translation methods and the sanity of the translator. …