5 ideas
From 1943 to 1946 Antonin Artaud was held at the Rodez asylum under Dr Gaston Ferdière. Ferdière gave him roughly fifty electroshock treatments while also encouraging him to draw, write and translate as therapy.
Artaud argues that electroshock does not cure delusion. It destroys the continuity of consciousness and memory from which a person rebuilds identity, leaving a void the patient must painfully refill. On this view, a treatment judged successful because the patient becomes quieter and more compliant has actually removed the thinking subject rather than healed it.
Artaud reads the asylum's power as the power to decide which utterances count as meaning and which count as symptoms. Once his invented syllables, curses and claims of bewitchment are classed as illness, nothing he says can serve as testimony against his doctors. Seen this way, a diagnosis can disqualify a witness as well as describe a condition.
In his Rodez letters rejecting Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky', which he had translated, Artaud distinguishes nonsense made as clever play at the surface of language from speech wrenched out of bodily suffering. He accuses Carroll of profiting from other people's pain while risking nothing himself. A language earns its strangeness, he argues, only when the writer has paid for it with his own body and existence.
Artaud inserts invented sound-syllables into his letters as a language that cannot be taken over by grammar, dictionary or doctor. They serve as a private territory of meaning after his ordinary words have been confiscated as symptoms.