Alienism
Les gemissements poetiques de ce sicle ne sont que des sophismes - Lautreamont, Chants de Maldoror
In contrast to Disintegrationism,
ALIENISM originated as a movements of writers, poets
and philosophers, and has only recently been latched onto by the painters. Its
situation with respect to music has always been rather bizarre. Although
alienist writers and painters frequently assert that they are trying to
transubstantiate formal and emotive structures already pre-existent in music
into their own media, the musicians have always refused to have anything to do
with them.
ALIENISM was invented by the French
author HERV DUCHASSE ( 1934-82). The word Alienisme was intended only characterize
his own writings. One could however argue, with more
justice, that it actually characterizes his way of life. There is
more than enough
biographical material lying around to substantiate this claim,
despite the fact that it is so
often impossible to decide what should
be accepted as truth and what what should be
treated as legend. Herve DuChasse,
like many another author of our day, was obsessed with a compulsion to spread
apocryphal stories about himself.
The clouds of mystery were, if anything, thickened by the discovery, just a few years ago,
of a large, hand-written fragment of an autobiography in the DuChasse archives, now in the Bibliothque
Nationale. There are at least as many fabrications[1] in this ludicruous,
though often rapturous
text, as there are in the many stories that circulated about him
in the literary haut monde of Paris while he lived.
Indeed,
DuChasse may have been a great writer, but the sad
fact is that he would not have recognized the truth if it had walked in through
the front door and bitten his hand. One might even say that truth was contrary
to his philosophy: Alienism firmly rejects truth.
There is a general concensus on the fact that his wild,
dissipated life, (DuChasse has reserved an entire chapter to himself in the
mythology of the pote maudit ), was
the unfortunate result of the terrible sufferings he endured as a child growing
up under the Nazi Occupation,
in the desolate hamlet of Ainay le Chateau,
just south of Bourges in the region known as the Bourbonnais.
Ainay le Chateau is, literally, a village of madmen. It is
one of the towns designated by the French mental hospital
system as a therapeutic center and out-patient colony. Incurable mental cases
judged harmless enough to live outside the hospital walls, yet incapable of
functioning independently in the greater society, are quartered in the village
and assigned to menial jobs in its stores, restaurants and small factories.
DuChasse, in other words, grew up in a village
about equally divided between Germans, maniacs and respectable bourgeois
citizens. His father, the village pharmacist, employed three of these
psychotics as janitor, delivery clerk and stockboy.
According to DuChasse,
whose veracity must always be doubted, these three men were
used by the Gestapo as assistants in the torturing and execution of members of
the French Resistance. Ainay lies at the edge of the Foret de Tronais ; the forest was a natural refuge for Resistance
soldiers. Every night, so he claims, these three ghouls would return to his
fathers pharmacy and terrify the young DuChasse with
stories of what they had seen and done. He also asserts somewhere that they
tried to drive him mad by threatening to do similar things to him, even tying
him up for that purpose.
All of this is – well - at least
believable; yet when DuChasse goes on to say that
they sometimes took him along with them to their grisly seances,
or that they used to conceal the carcasses of flayed and eviscerated animals
under his bedcovers, or that he murdered one of them with a mixture of chloral
hydrate taken from his fathers cabinets, then one begins to ask how far poetic
license should be allowed free rein.
And when, in other passages, DuChasse insists that the Gestapo tortured him as well, or
loads his readers down with vivid depictions of bloody scenes obviously written
for the purpose of turning their stomachs , then one
can confidently dismiss these
fantasies as the toxic wastes of a
deranged mind.
After his date of birth, the first
event in his life that can be accurately fixed is his first epileptic seizure.
It happened on the afternoon of June 24th, 1957, in the World War I Armistice
boxcar in the forest of Compigne. This boxcar is an
exact replica of the one in which, in 1918, the armistice that ended World
War I was signed. It was meticulously reconstructed in 1946, as the original had been demolished by the
Germans, down to the last thread of the last seat cushion, in 1940.
Herv DuChasse
claims to have provoked the fit deliberately: he often referred to it as The
first artwork of the Alienist movement . Clearly this is hindsight. The word Alienisme does not appear in any of his writings until 5
years later, by which time he had already come out with the 3 volumes of poetry
hed begun as an inmate at the Bictre mental asylum.
The significance of this monstrous
boxcar, atavistic symbol of xenophobia, chauvinism and blood, was not the sort
of thing to be lost on the DuChassian imagination. He
describes it in the following passage:
Imagine-toi, si tu en est capable, cette immense tas dordures, ce necrolithe
nephaste de l'epouvante et
de linsolite, puanteur de soutien-couilles de macreau maladive, temple immonde reconstruit jusqu' la molle par les fistules de la politique pour lensevelisement
de leur hontesse, symbole vritable de lanti-symbole, cadavre vermoulu de la force splenitive
de la frnesie chasse-pouvoir,
biberon gluant suintant des ptes barbares du sicle vingtieme.................. [2]
DuChasse generally sounds like this: there is
not a harmonious note in his entire opus, save it be the music of the charnel-house, the dungheap, or
the execution block.
Over
the following
year he was afflicted by a series of epileptic fits in close
succession. The DuChasse family, acting on bad advice
from his elder brother, a medical student at the Sorbonne, sent him to the
notorious megalomaniac, Jacques Laan, for
therapy. Laan
had just published his essay " Les
Psychoses" , and was yet to be
kicked out of the French Psychiatric Society because all of his patients were
committing suicide. After 4 sessions with the fsmous
doctor, DuChasse broke his nose. It is claimed that
at the moment of doing so he cried out:
"
I will not carry around on my back the corpse of my father!"
This ringing challenge to all that is
decadent in Society and Art appears on the title page of DuChasse's
long polemic essay, "Alienisme et Sanctit" ( Alienism and
Holiness) , published in 1965 by Editions
de Minuit .
His rash action and the statement that
went with it may well have made history, may indeed have broken down the dams
of reaction to release the intoxicating floods of Alienism, but it landed DuChasse in the Hopital Bictre, strapped to a metal cot in a strait jacket with a
rag pushed down his throat.
DuChasse's personality was nothing if not idiosyncratic:
contrary to expectations, the 6 months he spent in isolation were very beneficial to him. For the first
time in his life he was able to disentangle his thinking. This also aroused in
him the burning desire to communicate that thinking to all mankind.
Following his release from the padded
cell he remained on
the premises of the Bictre for another 2 years. It was then that he cultivated
his appetite for voracious, even frenzied, reading. Although he read everything
he could get his hands onto, his principal influences were Villon, Rabelais,
the Marquise de Sade, Lautramont, Baudelaire,
Nietzsche, Krafft-Ebbing, Rimbaud, Jarry, Artaud, Genet, Pound,
Proust and Cline . He consumed the entire published
opus of Cline, (as well as a few
privately circulated novels in manuscript smuggled in for him by the hospital attendants ) , in one week!
Anything that aroused disgust amused
him. When he was not self-consciously absorbing literature, he could be found
pouring over treatises on medical anomalies, books on lurid sexual practices,
barbarous executions or descriptions of grotesque medical procedures.
Yet the
Existentialists ( who at that time were basking in the international
limelight) irritated him. Legend
has it that on the very evening of the day of his release from the wards of the
Bictre in 1960, he took a bus all the way across
Paris to the Caf des Deux Magots,
the well-known hangout for the worshippers of Sartre and Camus. There he
shocked the existentialist crowd and its dilletante
affiliates by bursting through the door, brandishing his fists, and crying:
" I hurl the Alienist defiance at the world!"
In its early stages the cult of Alienisme was based on 3 principles:
I.
THE
COMFORT IN ANY THOUGHT IS A MEASURE OF ITS ALIENATION FROM REALITY.
II.
IT
IS THE DUTY OF THE ARTIST TO DESTROY HIMSELF.
III.
IT
IS THE FUNCTION OF ART TO CHANGE LIFE.
Of these three, DuChasse
believed the third to be his most original and lasting contribution to
civilization. It must be conceded that, although the idea itself is far from
original, having
echoes as far back as the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux , yet it is
doubtful that there has been another artist in our tradition who advocated the means DuChasse
employed to this admirable goal.
In Alienisme et Sanctit , DuChasse identifies three human types as beings "
possessed with demiurgic immanence " , that is to say, having the power to
bring about real changes in the world. He describes them by a wide range of
labels, his most commonly used appellations being le branleur , le
tabasseur , and le
fracasseur. These may be roughly translated into
English as the flasher, the mugger, and the vandal.
By a flasher of course, he meant the
kind of person who exposes his or her genitals or other private parts in public
places, accompanied with some sort of manipulation of them or other grossly
indecent act. Apparently
DuChasse practiced this himself. Soon
after his release from the mental hospital, DuChasse
moved to Charleville- Mezires,
the birthplace of Arthur Rimbaud. As he puts it, he wanted "to be close to the sources of inspiration."
During his stay in Charleville he adopted a dissolute
yet stable routine combining alcoholism, epileptic seizures, long bouts of
compulsive writing, and flashing.
Such behavior did not go over very well
with the respectable citizenry of Charleville, and before too
long DuChasse was arrested and put on trial for
indecent exposure.
When asked if he had anything to say in
his own defense, he replied ".....but the thing is,
to mutilate the mind." This presented the jury with an insurmountable
stumbling block . The phrase is taken from a letter
written by Rimbaud to a school companion. The "cult of Arthur
Rimbaud" is Charleville's primary tourist
attraction. Putting a man in jail for exemplifying the philosophy of Charleville's illustrious native son might have
produced a strong adverse reaction on the part of the caravels of college students slated to descend upon the town from all
over the world within a few months.
Herv DuChasse was
therefore released from prison, but banished from Charleville
for 20 years.
Eventually he migrated to a very desolate
region on the North Coast of Brittany, close by the coastal town of Ploubazlanec. There the local population quickly caught
onto his ways and just let him do what he wanted.
We turn now to the mugger: DuChasse, as far as we know, did not himself engage in
mugging, rather contenting himself with a literary veneration of the mugger
verging on deification.
" Le voyou", he wrote, ( one of his
synonyms ) " est l"Apothose
de l'Absolu ". [3]
Commenting on a newspaper account of a
teenage punk who beat a 90-year old man with his own cane to steal his Social Security
check, DuChasse dubs the act " l'orgasme de Dieu" : God's orgasm. At one stage in his
career, DuChasse became possessed of a species of
demonic energy that enabled him to write, at a single sitting, 600 pages of
infatuated praise to the cold-blooded killer, the ruthless adolescent hood, the
executioner, the organizers of massacres, and various other " artists of egoism and action" who,
through their arbitrary acts of cruelty, "transformed life".
Up to that point the actual violence
perpetrated by DuChasse seems to have been pretty
much limited to that blow on the nose delivered to Laan.
Under such domination
anyone of healthy mind might
have acted as he did. The vandal, in the DuChassian
iconography, lies
somewhere between the flasher and the mugger. DuChasse
did engage in small bouts of vandalism and sometimes ended up in jail because
of them. Such incidents only happened when he was drunk, and do not seem to have been
related to any theoretical premise. The vandal is described by him as " Un crapule
au coeur de lache" : the
criminal with the heart of a coward. His heart indeed is in the right place,
but it pumps milk, not blood.
In the early 1970's Herv
DuChasse's epileptic seizures increased in both
severity and frequency. There are several independent reports of persons
encountering him staggering across the savage Breton countryside very late at
night, a bottle of rotgut wine in hand, his head exposed under the beating
rains, crying out for protection against conspiracies of Lesbians, Nazis,
Satanists,
Existentialists, the French Secret Police and the CIA. During one
such night he took refuge in a wayside bar near Loguivy.
Soaked to the bone, drunk to the point of insensibility and all but totally
insane, his besotted gaze chanced to fall onto a wine-drenched and tobacco
stained paperback
copy of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal.
Browsing through it at random, he
came upon this magnificent passage fromLa Charogne :
"Les jambes en l'air, comme une
femme lubrique
Brulante
et suant les poisons
Ouvrait
d'une faon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein
d'exhalaisons ."
[4]
This passage had a calming effect on DuChasse's shattered mind. He moved closer to the fireplace
and, in
the manner of a catechism, began
mumbling it to himself over and over again. He kept this up until the village gendarme arrived, hustled him into the panier salade and drove him over to the detox
tank in St. Brieuc.
It is this isolated passage from the
works of Baudelaire that has been credited with transforming Herv DuChasse from a basketcase into an important French writer. As we might say
today he "got his act together." He himself speaks of this revelation
as akin to a mystical experience. Six months later he was back in Paris. Here he was to
remain for the rest of his days.
Much later in life, DuChasse
would evoke these 7 years of exile in Champagne and Brittany in the long poem by which he is
best known outside of France, "L'Abscs ", the one that begins:
"How dearly we paid for the cheap sins of youth....."
His life would henceforth be dedicated
to the promotion, through novel, poem, tract and play, of the dogma of the alien experience. We defer
discussion of the meaning of this phrase so that we may finish up this brief
biographic sketch.
In 1973 , 8 years after the first edition of Alienisme et Sanctit , Alienism finally caught fire. From
1965 until his death 15 years later, Herv DuCasse published 13 novels, 9 volumes of poetry, 3 plays
and endless volumes of literary, philosophic and didactic journalism.
He also fathered about 20 children by
as many women.
Only two of them reached maturity; both are in institutions.
Only once again did he land in prison. It happened in
July of 1969. During a cocktail
party arranged by Editions de Seuil to launch a succes de scandale [5] , someone innocently remarked that NASA
had just landed a man on the moon. DuChasse
spontaneously went crazy and stabbed the person closesr
to him, not fatally but seriously, with a steak knife. It appears
that DuChasse imagined that he was warding off one of those aliens
about whom hed been writing for his entire career. French justice would have
kept him behind bars for life, but a petition to the government signed by every
major French literary figure led to release after a year. DuChasse
was docile from then on.
He died in 1980. He was run over by a
truck after stepping out backwards out of an elevator into the street. At his
request the following inscription, a quotation from the works of Richard
Wagner, was placed on his tombstone:
" I believe in a Last Judgment at which all those who have in this world
dared to traffic in sublime and chaste art, all those who have polluted and
degraded it by the baseness of their sentiments, by their vile greed for
material pleasures, will be condemned to terrible punishment. On the other hand,
I believe that the faithful disciples of great art will be glorified and,
surrounded by a heavenly amalgam of rays, perfumes and melodious sounds, will
return to themselves for all eternity in the bosom of the divine source of harmony . "
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
II.
Alienism, Mode and
Modality
"..... This thread has not guided us in vain, since it had led us to
formulate, by the end of last year, our experimental separation of the subject
as a division between knowledge and truth, accompanied by a topological model,
the Mbius strip, which makes us realize that it is
not a distinction at the origin which produces the division at the place where
the two terms come together..."
-Jacques Lacan,
Science & Truth, 1966
"ALIENISM IS HOSTILE TO TRUTH !" : So
begins a polemic by DuChasse's
most prominent disciple in modern French letters, Armand Benoit Couture.
"Truth" in this context is broad enough to encompass everything from
scientific knowledge to the reporting in the daily newspapers, moral and social
justice, artistic
integrity, and even true love.
Coture goes on to state that Alienism strives
for " the immobilization of life and
the animation of the inanimate." The intention behind of an alienist artwork is to
create the alien experience. Despite his evident anti-rationalist bias, Couture
can be quite lucid when he describes those situations that provoke the alien
experience:
"
You are standing in the busy marketplace of a unknown town; or, better still
let us say that you are in the downtown area of a big industrial city in a foreign country. In
one way or another, you have lost your bearings.
"The
long cavernous street yawns like the open mouth of a killer shark,
pregnant with elemental terrors; in every direction you encounter filth, noise
and stench; you see many things
around you that you find disquieting:
gigantic and sinister office buildings suroound
you and block out the sunlight ; an abandoned automobile , pouring smoke from
its entrails, is smashed up against a streetlamp that droops like a jaundiced
poplar; panhandlers, their bodies
teeming with vermin paw bankers
trying to get past them on the way to
their offices; a street musician, a blind one-legged old woman, bangs a
drum, little more than a kitchen pot, and whines for pennies.
"
Suddenly you say to yourself: This can't really be happening! You are certain
that your imagination must be playing tricks with your mind. You keep coming
back to re-examine the scene, carefully, not a few but many times. But it does not change;
it does not go away; it is not just in your imagination. Nor does the
conviction that it can't really be there go away either. Nothing can make this
feeling disappear. Days, months, even decades after you were witness to this
environment, you remain convinced that you could not possibly have seen what
you thought you saw.
"That is the
alien experience."
In another essay Couture writes:
"
The alien experience is the vase of roses in the
torture chamber of the concentration camp.
It is the senile professor of Latin who, while talking non-stop at the
blackboard, chews off his fingers. It is the flasher who shits in the elementary school
playground. It is the man who, craving the ultimate alien experience, eats a
meal of crushed glass. It is the experimental theologian who crucifies animals
to investigate Christs sensations.
It is Ronald and Nancy Reagan love-making in the White
House. It is the Ayatollah Khomeinidi strangling Idi Amin with the guts of Yitzhak Shamir
. It is the state that burns
mountains of
potatoes to help its starving citizens. It is the screams of the
worms in those burning potatoes. It is the experience of writing an alienist
poem. It is the experience of reading an alienist poem. It is everything that
cannot-be-yet-is, and is-yet-cannot-be. "
As
it stands Couture's relatively hum-drum, even tepid, description of Alienism , so commonplace when compared to the embittered
raptures of his great master, DuChasse, seems to be
simply a matter of identifying and communicating ordinary feelings of
alienation that we all experience from time to time. That Alienism is a new direction in
thought, entirely unlike anything
seen in the past, only becomes clear when one turns to other writers of
less literary ability perhaps, yet greater philosophical acumen. The following
passages are
taken from the long essay Alienisme et Aristote ,
by Martin Byzance, published in the magazine Tel Quel in 1978:
" Alienism maintains", he argues, " that the comprehensible is always literally false. If you understand
something it cannot be true. If it is true you cannot have understood it.
Alienism poses, therefore, an advance beyond Aristotle, and is even now still
searching for some logician who will provide it with its appropriate dialectical and diacritical
formalisms."
Certainly the alienist praxis in Alienisme et Aristote is not designed to endear itself to logicians.
Byzance goes on to produce a list of examples illustrative of this
bold doctrine:
" Let us imagine that you are
talking to an Alienist, and that you are not one yourself. You inform him that
you believe there is some truth to be found in the equation '2+2=4' . The
Alienist would probably reply in this fashion:
"
Vile disseminator of lies and seducer of youth! Gluttonous abortion ( Avorton gourmand )!! You really
expect me to take you seriously! To listen to your pathetic lies
, you buggered rat-face,
( Bougre au visage du rat)??? Get out of my
house at once;
your ignorance shits!!! I don't want to be forced to exterminate
you!! I refuse to drink my mother's blood from your father's skull!!! .....
"
It may happen
that you have misunderstood the source
of the Alienist's rage; you may conclude that youd offended him by wasting his time,
stating something so completely innocuous. and
Attempting to make your observations
more interesting, you say:
"
Don't forget to close your windows; there's a good chance of rain tonight." , he
will immediately shout:
"
Pauvre bouffie, tu ravasse!! (
You're raving ,you pitiful fatso) . Go immolate your feet if you want excitement! Your
quest for truth snivels like a squid!
Va boire du sable avant que je ne me branle et emmerde
ton cerveau!
(Go and drink sand before I expose my prick and mess up your mind ) Until you
have mashed your balls to porridge I forbid you to speak with me! "
Couture and Byzance are both fashionable. Other
writers profiting from the contemporary vogue for Alienism are Marie St. Clair Bourgignon, Roger Aimable, Denis Rotonde, Aristide l'Eveque,
Etienne Narzinski, and the writers of the review Blouson Noir .
One does not know how long this fad
will last, and the Maison du Livre in Paris is already hedging its bets on the next
literary movement.
Groups of writers calling themselves
alienists can be found today in every country under the influence of the
Western European cultural tradition. Certain places such as Russia, Germany,
Korea, Syria, Brazil, Iran, Burundi, and South Africa find nothing new in the dogma of
the alien experience. The alienist writers in such places merely continue in
the footsteps of a rich cultural heritage.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
I conclude this essay with my free
translation of the first four verses of L'Abscs
by Herv DuChasse :
The
Abcess
How dearly we paid the cheap sins of
youth,
Rusting the pin I twine out of the eye;
I, reeling through slaughter, grunt in
my sty
To shatter my
kneecaps on splinters of truth.
Oh, thrice-blessed Christ, epileptic of
days!
I fondle your pardon: forgive these
blood-soaked
stumps;
And chew, dear Lord, the dung I pat in
lumps
Like the knowing butcher, kissing the
skin he flays!
Once I bumbled in Charleville;
I dropped my pants!
I, Rimbaud of the age; I vaunted my
peter!
To slimy bourgeois scum, sickening
cunt-eaters,
Their assholes labyrinthing billions of ants!
So tender these ruins
, of grief and of remorse
These entrails of snot, these tarpits of pisses;
How swim the green faeces
of the colic horse,
To touch the
tumescent Rose with incorporeal kisses?
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
[1] We shall refrain from following through on the natural conclusions
to which our suspicions lead us, and call them outright lies.
[2] Just imagine, if you are able to do so, that enormous garbage heap,
that mephitic necrolith of supernatural terror, that stink of the jockstrap of a
sickly pimp, that detestable temple built, down to its very marrow, by the
fistulas of the political world, for the burial of their shamelessness, veritable
symbol of the anti-symbol, wormy corpse of the splenitive force of the
lust for power, sticky baby formula seeping the barbarous farts of the 20th century.
[3] The thug epitomizes ultimate reality
[4] With Its legs, in the air like a raunchy whore's,
Its stomach, burning and sweating poison ,
Bloated with seeping gases,
Opened in a fashion both cynical and indifferent.
[5] Both the author's name and the title of the book escape me right now,
but if I remember correctly, it was about the history of the use of the
fish as a metaphor in French literature.