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Irlande

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Pascale Amiot-Jouenne

II. L’île des romanciers

The Aran Islands, one by one: John Millington Synge and Antonin Artaud

Jonathan Pollock

Texte intégral

Ce n’est pas moi qui suis DIEU, c’est LUI, MON PÈRE qui n’existe pas, mais qui m’appelle jusqu’à ce que j’en tombe.
Antonin ARTAUD

1Ireland is an island surrounded by islands: a rather cumbersome one (Great Britain) and much smaller ones, such as the Aran group in Galway Bay. Hence, even from a strictly geographical point of view, Irish insularity and Irish singularity are to be understood in terms of multiplicity. This is not as paradoxical as it sounds. Etymologically, the Latin adjective singularis derives from singuli, « one by one », each « one » being distinct from the others but nonetheless in relation with them. A singularity is always one of several. A « first person singular » implies necessarily a « second person singular », and these two already compose a « first person plural ». This is why the term singularity has come to replace that of individuality in modem ontological theory: the expression être singulier pluriel, coined by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, signifies that existence is essentially co-existence. By definition, then, a singularity is not isolated, self-sufficient, autarchic, enclosed upon itself in the way that we commonly understand the adjective « insular » to mean. There is a near-contradiction in the very title of this volume which is perhaps not obvious at first sight. But after all, the entity under scrutiny is nothing if not contradictory.

2Far from defining a single mode of insularity, the Aran Islands (Aranmor, Inishmaan and Inishere) present three irreducible and interrelated « singularities ». None better than Synge, whose account of four successive stays on the islands was first published in 1907, has captured their singular plurality. However, rather than examine the islands « one by one », the present paper will focus upon writers who, « one by one », have visited Aran and, in particular, upon someone who, although his singularity is not inscribed in his name as is the case with Synge, was considered to be so eminently singular by the Irish police that he was arrested, deported and interned in a lunatic asylum upon his arrival back in France: the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud.

3The question which I wish to broach here, and which will allow us to revisit Synge’s work, is this: why did Artaud leave Paris for Ireland and the Aran Islands in the autumn of 1937? The question will seem anodyne enough to those who know nothing about the life and career of Antonin Artaud. One should bear in mind, however, that from the point of view of literary history, Artaud quite simply disappears in Ireland. It was only a year later that he was discovered in a Parisian psychiatric hospital and it is still unclear as to how he got to be there. What is more, except for trips abroad with his family or with various film crews (he was also an actor for the cinema), Artaud undertook of his own accord only one other journey before or after Ireland: he had spent the previous year (1936) in Mexico. His motives for going are to be found in articles written for Mexican newspapers:

  • 1 The indications which follow quotations from Artaud refer to the edition of his Œuvres complètes pu (...)

Je suis venu au Mexique pour fuir la civilisation européenne, issue de sept ou huit siècles de culture bourgeoise, et par haine de cette civilisation et de cette culture. J’espérais trouver ici une forme vitale de culture [...] (VIII, 236)1.

4Despite his disappointment, Mexico and especially his stay with the Tarahumara Indians will inspire his writings right up to the last weeks of his life. His journey to Ireland, on the other hand, has left almost no trace at all in his work. It is true that his last 1 texts evoke the circumstances of his arrest in Dublin, but as regards the Aran Islands, one has to consult his correspondence (some of which is still unpublished) and the National Archives in Dublin in order to find proof that he went there at all.

5In a letter to the Irish Legation dated 6th August 1937, Artaud writes:

Je cherche depuis quelques années les sources d’une très antique tradition. Je les ai cherchées au Mexique, et la Nouvelle Revue Française du 1er août dernier vient de publier une relation de mon Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras. Mais ces sources chez les hommes sont mortes là-bas. J’ai conçu le projet de retrouver en Irlande les sources vivantes, et vivantes chez les hommes vivants de cette très antique tradition dans sa forme occidentale. Ce n’est pas un projet littéraire, ce n’est pas un projet de musée, ce n’est pas un projet de savant... J’ai besoin pour cela d’atteindre le pays où a vécu John Millington Synge. D’être reçu par des gens, par les gens de là-bas comme l’un d’entre eux.

6 Le pays où a vécu John Millington Synge can be none other than the Aran Islands for that is where he will go immediately upon arriving at Cobh. Léon Bazalgette had published a French translation of The Aran Islands in 1921 and this, along with Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran (1934), must have struck a deep cord in a writer proclaiming himself to be « un vrai Désespéré qui [...] ne connaît le bonheur d’être au monde que maintenant qu’il a quitté ce monde, et qu’il en est absolument séparé » (VII, 121). There is no knowing what exactly it was in Synge’s account that inspired Artaud. Any attempt to read The Aran Islands through his eyes can only be impressionistic. One may, however, attain to a certain degree of objectivity by noting certain parallels, certain echoes between the two writers.

7Synge also had been living in Paris prior to his first visit to the islands. Synge also was a playwright, whose production was to be greatly enriched by his stays on Aran: not only Riders to the Sea, but equally The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World originated in stories he heard over there. If we are to believe W. B. Yeats, it was upon his instigation that Synge first went to Aran:

  • 2 W. B. Yeats, “Mr Synge and his Plays”, in J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Other P (...)

I said: « Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression2 ».

  • 3 Page references are to J. M. Synge. The Aran Islands, Oxford, (1962) 1984.
  • 4 W. B. Yeats, « The Literary Movement in Ireland », Essays and Introductions, Macmillan, 1961.

8 Elsewhere, Yeats takes this reasoning one step further. In the context of the Irish literary revival, he encouraged potential poets and playwrights to draw their inspiration indiscriminately from contemporary folk-beliefs and the recently translated Old Irish epics, the idea being « to understand the saga by the peasant and the peasant by the saga » (Samhain, 1905). According to this way of thinking, life on Aran had already found expression in, say, the Red Branch cycle of Early Irish literature; and, conversely, the spirit of the people who had sung the feats of Cuchulain or Finn MacCool was still to be found on the Islands. Thus, not only was the life on Aran, in Synge’s words3, « perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe » (9), but also « the wild mythology that is accepted on the islands » (10) leads back to the very wellsprings of the Western imagination: « Alone among nations », writes Yeats, « Ireland has in her written Gaelic literature, in her old love tales and battle tales, the forms in which the imagination of Europe uttered itself before Greece shaped the tumult of legend into her music of the arts4 ». Antonin Artaud is perfectly Yeatsian in this respect.

  • 5 « This grief of the keen [...] seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in e (...)

9Synge reports a number of details which may have convinced Artaud that the culture he was in search of, and which he thought to have found in the Sierra Tarahumara, was in fact much closer at hand: « Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of mediaeval life » (14). Assertions of this nature pepper Artaud’s theatrical writings: « Que nous en revenions à la mentalité ou même simplement aux habitudes de vie du Moyen Age, [...] et j’estimerais alors que nous aurons accompli la seule révolution qui vaille la peine qu’on en parle » (II, 25). Perhaps Artaud recognised something of his own rage and despair in Synge’s evocation of the keen5, something of his own nature in the « old type found on these few acres at the extreme border of Europe, where it is only in wild jests and laughter that they can express their loneliness and desolation » (118). And indeed, Synge compares the islanders to artists and manic-depressives:

The continual passing in this island between the misery of last night and the splendour of today, seems to create an affinity between the moods of these people and the moods of varying rapture and dismay that are frequent in artists, and in certain forms of alienation (36).

  • 6 ‘There was more than that in it’, said another man, ‘for the night before a woman had a great sight (...)

10Just as « These people make no distinction between the natural and the supernatural » (101), Artaud professes not to know « ce qui est normal ou supra-normal » (VII, 179). The vision of the dead on the Western side of Inishmaan6 will have reminded him perhaps that in European mythology, the Fortunate Isles ( “les îles des Bienheureux”) are almost always situated to the North-west of the world. This gives us a clue as to other, perhaps unconscious reasons for his visiting Aran.

11Having found lodgings with a certain Sean O’Milleain on Aranmor, Artaud informs his family:

Je suis à la recherche de la dernière descendante authentique des Druides, celle qui possède les secrets de la philosophie druidique, sait que les hommes descendent du dieu de la mort « Dis Pater » et que l’humanité doit disparaître par l’eau et le feu » (VII, 202)

12This letter tells us several things. Firstly, he is in search of a woman. Secondly, he has read Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. Thirdly, in a letter to his family, he evokes the god of the dead and the god of death, the primitive father whose title « Dis » can read as an interpellation: « Dis! ». Lastly, he harks upon the end of the world.

  • 7 Caesar, De Bello Gallico, VI, XIII.

13According to Julius Caesar, Druids watch over divine things: « Their doctrine was elaborated in Britain, and from there, it is believed, brought to Gaul, and even nowadays most people who wish to improve their knowledge of this doctrine go over there to study it ». The Druids teach, Caesar continues, that « men’s souls do not perish at death, but pass from one body into another7. This is a conviction that Artaud had come to share:

14 « A penser à toutes les douleurs de mon corps et à en retrouver l’inmêlable [sic], inaliénable registre, je me suis vu faire d’étranges chemins dans l’espace de plusieurs vies. – En Chine, en Perse, à Thèbes, dans les Andes, sur les bords de l’Atlantique au temps des Celtes et enfin à Jérusalem » (XXVI, 153).

  • 8 Hippolytas, Philosophumena, I, XXV.

15According to another ancient historian, Hippolytas, « The Celts believe in their Druids as seers and prophets because they can predict certain events by means of the computation and arithmetic of the Pythagoreans8 ». Artaud himself made use of this prophetical arithmetic in Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Etre, published anonymously just a month before his departure for Ireland. Just as the Druids foresaw, according to Caesar and Strabo, the destruction of the world by fire and water, « LE RÉVÉLÉ » prophesies « la Destruction totale par l’Eau, la Terre, le Feu, et par une Étoile qui occupera la surface totale de l’Air où l’Esprit de l’Homme a baigné [...] » (VII, 143). This destruction is to be brought about by a torturé, armed with a sword and a stick and who, in the guise of a « ROI DIVISEUR », will render « UNE JUSTICE INFERNALE » (VII, 140).

16During the course of the previous year, Artaud had effectively come into possession of a sword (bestowed upon him by a Cuban necromancer) and a knotty, iron-shod stick which never left his side. However, he was still lacking une dernière clef. He thinks that his personal intuition can give it to him:

Mais j’ai besoin actuellement que mon intuition soit confirmée, j’attends un dernier mot, un dernier signe. C’est pourquoi j’entreprends un dernier voyage et je l’entreprends seul » (VII, 196).

17What then is this « last key », this « last sign », and why is it to be looked for in Ireland? In a letter to Jean Paulhan admittedly written six years later, Artaud claims that he verified in Dublin « l’existence du ‘Graal’, l’émeraude sacrée éclose dans le sang même de Jésus-christ Fils de Dieu, à sa Descente de la Croix et apportée en Irlande par le Roi Cormac Mac Art après un pathétique voyage exécuté d’Armorique en Irlande, c’est-à-dire d’un bord à l’autre de la vieille Celtide sacrée » (X, 57).

18The mention of the Holy Grail introduces a Christian element into his system of belief, – « system » in so far as, according to Jacques Lacan, « le délire est le système d’un seul ». According to the Twelfth Century Book of the Dun Cow (Lebor na hUidre), Cormac son of Art was « a great king and a great judge »; unfortunately, « the evil spirits killed him [...] because Cormac had turned away from the Druids and worshipped God in their place ». The letters that Artaud wrote from Ireland reveal a similar kind of apostasy as regards la Vérité Païenne. His Mission remains « le retournement du monde sur le plan de l’esprit » (VII, 170) but, upon leaving Aran after a stay of only a few weeks, he places himself under the orders of God. In his own words, « Antonin Artaud est revenu à l’Église et à la foi catholique et chrétienne [...] à Dublin, en septembre 1937, et il [...] a communié un dimanche matin dans une Église de cette ville, où il était venu rapporter la canne de saint Patrick [...] » (X, 39), – « la canne de saint Patrick » being none other than the stick mentioned in Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Être.

  • 9 M. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, Gallimard, 1969, p. 437.

19Maurice Blanchot attributes Artaud’s religious mania to the « heurt violent de deux formes inconciliables du sacré », to the « impossible partage entre les dieux du retour et le Dieu du déclin9 ». This confrontation between the pagan gods and the Christian God lies at the very heart of the legends surrounding the reign of King Cormac and the mission of Saint Patrick. « The Adventures of Cormac in the Land of Promise » tells how the king debarks at Tir na nOg, to the west of Ireland, where he is received by Manannan, son of Ocean. Cormac, the first Christian king of Ireland, the last king of Tara, thus finds himself in the Land of Eternal Youth, among the sîd, a Gaelic word which designates the Other World, its inhabitants and the tumuli which are scattered all over Ireland.

  • 10 Plutarch, De facie in orbe Lunae, XXVI.

20Perhaps the Celtic Tir na nOg, of which the Aran Islands represent a possible location, combined in Artaud’s mind with Plutarch’s Ogygia. This latter « is a distant island in the sea, five days navigation away from Britain, towards the West. Three other islands [...] are to be found beyond it, in the North-west. In one of them, according to the legendary tales of the Barbarians, Saturn had been imprisoned by Jupiter10 ». Saturn is the Roman name for Dis Pater whom the Gaels called the Dagda ( « great father »), the druid god and the god of the Druids. One of his principal attributes was a stick which he used to kill with one end and resuscitate with the other. As we have seen, Artaud possessed just such a stick, which he claimed to have belonged to Saint Patrick. Before leaving for Ireland, he had read Georges Dottin’s Les Livres de saint Patrice, apôtre de l’Irlande, in which one learns that Saint Patrick visited a slightly christianised « Land of the Young », Jesus having granted to a couple of it’s inhabitants that they live without ageing until Doomsday. Upon Patrick’s arrival, the couple handed him a stick, saying that God had left it with them so that they might give it to him when he came to preach to the Gaels. This was the stick that Artaud was to return to the cathedral of Saint Patrick in Dublin.

21Not only, then, does Artaud conceive himself as following in the footsteps of John Millington Synge, but also in those of Saint Patrick and King Cormac MacArt. He goes to an island which, because it lies in the path of the setting sun, is traditionally associated with the Land of the Blessed and the Land of the Dead, and in which a divine son (Jupiter) had imprisoned a father (Saturn) who devoured his own progeny. Perhaps the key to Artaud’s quest is to be found in his own relation to a father who had died thirteen years earlier and whose name, Antoine-Roi Artaud, partly resembles that of the « Roi Cormac Mac Art ».

22Artaud’s literary career began with the anonymous publication of his Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière in September 1924. He had spent the summer at Saint-Malo, in Brittany, on the film set of Surcouf le roi des corsaires, in which he plays the traitor Jacques Morel. He returned to Paris on 4th September; on 7th his father died in Marseilles. He evokes his father’s death in a conference in Mexico:

J’ai vécu jusqu’à vingt-sept ans avec la haine obscure du Père, de mon père particulier. Jusqu’au jour où je l’ai vu trépasser. Alors cette rigueur inhumaine, dont je l’accusais de m’opprimer, a cédé. Un autre être est sorti de ce corps. Et pour la première fois de la vie ce père m’a tendu les bras (VIII, 146).

23Nevertheless, if at the end of this same year 1924 Artaud joins André Breton’s group, it is because, in his eyes, the Surrealist movement essentially represents « une profonde, une intérieure insurrection contre toutes les formes du Père [...] » (IX, 141). He writes Samouraï ou le drame du sentiment at the same period. During this « rêve scénique », the son becomes his mother’s lover and his sister’s husband; when his father appears in the guise of an “invraisemblable fantoche de roi », the son takes his sabre in both hands and cuts off his head. The only play produced by his Théâtre de la Cruauté, Les Cenci, also presents the murder of a father by his children, – an incestuous father who rapes his daughter and glories in the deaths of his sons. Artaud cast himself in the role of the father.

24At his return from Mexico, Artaud rejects his patronymic: « Au fait », he writes to his ephemeral fiancée, Cécile Schramme, in February 1937, « il faudrait enfin songer à baptiser cet enfant illégitime que je dois être puisque je n’ai pas encore de nom à moi » (VII, 160). He refuses to sign his « Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras »: « Il ne faut même pas d’initiales », he tells Jean Paulhan, « Rappelez-vous. La correspondance avec Rivière avait paru avec 3 étoiles et de tout ce que j’ai écrit c’est peut-être tout ce qui restera. Après 13 ans écoulés on dirait que j’en reviens au même point [...] » (VII, 180). This point is very precisely indicated in Les Nouvelles Révélations de l’Etre : « 7–9–1937 [...] Le 7, la porte de l’Infini est ouverte pour l’homme. Le torturé est enfin préparé. Il peut entrer, il est de plain-pied avec son œuvre. Il peut commencer » (VII, 144).

  • 11 Breton, who has been his principal correspondent since his arrival in Ireland, was staying as chanc (...)
  • 12 See for example Freud, « Une névrose diabolique au XVIIe siècle », L’inquiétante étrangeté et autre (...)

25On 7th September 1937, that is to say on the anniversary of his father’s death, Artaud informs André Breton11: « Je quitte Galway et je vais vers mon destin » (VII, 212). In his subsequent letters, he explains that Jesus Christ, whom he calls the « Fils-Shiva » and whose voice he hears every day, is « CONTRE la Création-Manifestation du Père, MAINTENUE par le Saint-Esprit » (VII, 221). In a letter to Jacqueline Breton, the last he sent from Ireland, he declares that Breton is none other than « l’intelligence active de Brahma, le Père [...] » (VII, 230). As for Artaud himself, he embodies the « Fils-Shiva » whose mission is to vanquish Vishnu, the Ante-Christ, and thereby to bring about the end of the world. However, « cette catastrophe ne sera pas totale puisque les eaux de la Vie sont restées »; what is more, « la lumière absolue va pourchasser la vie perdue dans les eaux et recouverte par les Eaux » (VII, 185-6). And in a love poem to Jacqueline, reminiscent of Ariel’s song « Full fathom five thy father lies » in The Tempest (1.2.396), Artaud writes: « Le trésor perdu sous la Mer c’est Vous » (VII, 181). Given the notorious ambivalence of the love sentiment, it is possible to diagnose, in Artaud’s case, an immense love for his father, a love which was displaced at his father’s death upon Breton and then, by negation, upon Jacqueline Breton, before a final fixation upon the person (s) of God, in so much as God represents, according to Freud, a copy of the father as he was perceived in childhood12.

26During his first stay on Inishmaan, Synge was told the following story by the oldest man on the island:

He often tells me about a Connaught man who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he was in a passion, and then fled to this island and threw himself upon the mercy of some of the natives with whom he was said to be related. They hid him in a hole [...] and kept him safe for weeks, though the police came and searched for him, and he could hear their boots grinding on the stones over his head (62).

  • 13 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre I, Seuil, « Points/Essais », p. 98.

27Such is the anecdote that inspired Synge’s best known play, The Playboy of the Western World; except that, in the play, the father reappears, much to the consternation of his son Christy Mahon who had seduced Pegheen Mike by boasting of his exploit. Christy knocks him down a second time, is immediately accused of parricide and only escapes from his persecutors thanks to his father who, having regained consciousness yet again, frees his son and persuades him to leave with him. It would seem that Artaud also had a love-hate relationship with a dead father who kept coming back to life. He had learnt from reading Synge that the use of the patronymic was rare on Aran: he will only start referring to himself as Artaud again in September 1943. However, if we are to believe Jacques Lacan, « ce qui a été forclos du symbolique réapparaît dans le réel » in the form of hallucinations13. God speaks to him every day. Artaud went to the Aran Islands in search of a dead father, if only to kill him one last time. As he says enigmatically in Suppôts et Suppliciations, “Les morts ne sont plus vivants parce qu’en réalité ils ne sont pas assez morts” (XIV*, 121).

Notes

1 The indications which follow quotations from Artaud refer to the edition of his Œuvres complètes published by Gallimard. The Roman numeral indicates the volume, the Arab numeral the page.

2 W. B. Yeats, “Mr Synge and his Plays”, in J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, Oxford, (1995) 1998, p. 52.

3 Page references are to J. M. Synge. The Aran Islands, Oxford, (1962) 1984.

4 W. B. Yeats, « The Literary Movement in Ireland », Essays and Introductions, Macmillan, 1961.

5 « This grief of the keen [...] seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas. » (p. 38)

6 ‘There was more than that in it’, said another man, ‘for the night before a woman had a great sight out to the west in this island, and saw all the people that were dead a while back in this island and the south island, and they all talking with each other’! (p. 138)

7 Caesar, De Bello Gallico, VI, XIII.

8 Hippolytas, Philosophumena, I, XXV.

9 M. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, Gallimard, 1969, p. 437.

10 Plutarch, De facie in orbe Lunae, XXVI.

11 Breton, who has been his principal correspondent since his arrival in Ireland, was staying as chance would have it on the Island of Ouessant, off Finistère.

12 See for example Freud, « Une névrose diabolique au XVIIe siècle », L’inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais, trad. B. Féron, Gallimard, « folio essais », p. 287.

13 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre I, Seuil, « Points/Essais », p. 98.

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