The Chimalpahin Conference 2007:

Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness

Catherine Dale

Department of English 

University of Otago Dunedin

(New Zealand)

The French writer, theorist and actor Antonin Artaud spent almost eight months in Mexico. While there he developed various projects including giving a number of lectures and and writing articles and essays. His writings on Mexico fall broadly into two main camps. First are his “Revolutionary Messages” to Mexican youth on the potential for a revolution of the mind as opposed to a Marxist social revolution. One of his main concerns was to join in the struggle of the indigenous people. The second set of texts comes out of this interest. Here he describes and critiques his visit to the Tarahumaras Indians in the Sierra Madre, which is where he attended a peyote ritual. There is a lot of critical and expository work that deals with Artaud’s trip to Mexico and his ideas about its political, cultural and sacred dimensions. One of the problems with any analysis of Artaud’s trip to Mexico is, however, the tendency to recognise his voyage as part of a modernist romanticisation of some lost past, the memory of a lost spiritual life, and to consider his work through a loosely interpreted post-colonial theory. This strategy considers Artaud’s visit through the lens of the dual trap of relativism and universalism. Such an approach conflates Artaud’s expectations of his trip, the trip itself and his writings about it as if context and memory have little bearing. 

In this paper, I want to concentrate instead on the effects of Artaud’s trip, in particular I want to investigate the effects and events that might help undermine both his and our own expectations about visiting another culture. What happens to the disappointment and failure of what looks at first and to all intents and purposes as an ethnological project coloured by orientalism? There is in Artaud’s work on Mexico a performative project that confronts its own Eurocentric tendencies. The lectures, diatribes, publications, exhibitions, and poetry produced on this trip are fraught with difficulties: clichés, deliriums and disruptions. I want to look at the way what happened on his trip and later on his return to France interrupt the certainty of the two poles of relativism and universalism. Artaud may have begun by searching for an impersonal, inhuman spirit still glowing in the fire all but extinguished by the Spanish colonisers, he may also have been looking for something heartening which he could take back to Europe, and yet, as my paper will show, things for Artaud did not go exactly to plan. There are reports of him wandering the streets aimlessly, of accelerating his opiate habit, of annoying various artists and writers with his anti-Marxism and of damaging his relationship with his host country by commenting on the government’s own revolutionary messages. This paper will explore the differences between a simple narrative of Eurocentric traveller seeking himself through another’s culture and the story of the messiness of encountering that culture. What do the differences between the two kinds of post-colonial travel tell us not only about Artaud's cultural encounters but about what encountering culture might mean in the first place?

About Catherine Dale