Antonin Artaud gets out of Rodez, nine years of psychiatric lockup, electroshock frying his brain, and the first thing he does is get near a microphone. Thévenin sets him up with this radio program, Club d’Essai, and Artaud records Les Malades et les médecins. The whole thing’s a middle finger to the doctors: You want to know about sickness? The patients know. We’ve been down there. We’ve seen what you fuckers won’t look at, the hideous beauty you’re too chickenshit to acknowledge.
Listen to this recording. His voice sounds like gravel scraped across concrete, words forced through a mouth that electroshock had basically destroyed. He’s hammering out syllables, whistling them through broken teeth. And he hates it. He thinks his rhythm’s off, so he immediately does another one, Aliénation et magie noire, about waking up from electroshock, that absolute terror of not knowing who you are anymore. In this one, he just goes for the throat: French psychiatry is sexual butchery. They’re putting people into insulin comas, shock comas, artificial deaths, and robbing them. Death is black magic, Artaud says, and these doctors are practicing it.
But he’s still not satisfied. His voice on tape isn’t the voice in his head. So he disappears from radio for a year.
Then La Voix des Poétes (The voice of the poets) calls. Do whatever you want, they tell him. Two weeks later, two weeks, and the guy’s dying of anal cancer, he’s written Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu. He’s rehearsed his collaborators once. That’s it. They record the pieces between November 22nd and 29th, 1947. Then on January 16, 1948, Antonin Artaud and Roger Blin (the guy who directed the first productions of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days) record the bruitage, the screams, the glossolalia, the percussion, the primal noise underneath language.
What you get is this cacophony of rhythm and chaos and laughter, sound trying to become physical image, fracturing space, marking both presence and absence simultaneously. It’s Artaud’s last stand against language itself: interrogating it, dissecting it, smashing it to pieces, trying to forge from the wreckage something that actually expresses what a human body is.
This time, finally, Antonin Artaud says yes. This is it. This transmission hits the nervous system directly.