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ELECTROSHOCK (fragment) Antonin Artaud I died at Rodez under electroshock. I died. Legally and medically died. Electroshock coma lasts fifteen minutes. A half an hour or more and then the patient breathes. Now one hour after the shock I still had not awakened and had stopped breathing. Surprised at my abnormal rigidity, an attendant had gone to get the physician in charge, who after examining me with a stethoscope found no more signs of life in me. I have personal memories of my death at that moment, but it is not on those that I base my testimony as to the fact. I limit myself strictly to the details furnished me by Dr. Jean Dequeker, a young intern at the Rodez asylum, who had them from the lips of Dr. Ferdiere himself. And the latter asserts that he thought me dead that day, and that he had already sent for two asylum attendants to instruct them on the removal of my corpse to the morgue, since an hour and a half after shock I had still not come to myself. And it seems that just at the moment that these attendants arrived to take my body out, it gave a slight shudder, after which I was suddenly wide awake. Personally I have a different recollection of the affair. But I kept this recollection to myself, and secret, until the day when Dr. Jean Dequeker on the outside confirmed it to me. And this recollection is that everything which Dr. Jean Dequeker told me, I had seen, but not from this side of the world but from the other, and quite simply from the cell where the shock took place and under its ceiling; although for moments there was neither cell nor ceiling for me, but rather a rod above my body, floating in the air like a sort of fluidified balloon suspended between my body and the ceiling. And I shall indeed never forget in any possible life the horrible passage of this sphincter of revulsion and asphyxia, through which the criminal mob of beings forces the patient in extremis before letting go of him. At the bedside of a dying man there are more than 10,000 beings, and I took note of this at that moment. There is a conscious unanimity among all these beings, who are unwilling to let the dead man come back to life before he has paid them by giving up his corpse totally and absolutely; for existence will not give even his inert body back to him, in fact especially his body. And what do you expect a dead man to do with the body in the grave? At such a time, "I am you and your consciousness is me," is what all the beings say: salesmen, druggists, grocers, subway conductors, sextons, knifegrinders, railroad gatekeepers, shopkeepers, bankers, priests, factory managers, educators, scientists, doctors, not one of them missing at the crucial moment. Pity that no other dead person outside myself should have returned to confirm the matter, for generally the dead do not return. The electroshock accomplished, this one didn't run its course, as had the first two. I felt that it wasn't going away. And my whole inward body, the whole lie of this inward electric body which for a certain number of centuries has been the burden of every human being, turned inside out, became in me like an immense turning outward in flames, monads of nothingness bristling to the limits of an existance held prisoner in my lead body, which could neither get out of its lead body nor stand up like a lead soldier. I could no longer be my body, I didn't want to be this breath turning to death all around it, until its extreme dissolution. Thus wrung out and twisted, fiber on fiber, I felt myself to be the hideous corridor of an impossible revulsion. And I know not what suspension of the void invaded me with its groping blind spots, but I was that void, and in suspension, as for my soul, I was nothing more than a spasm among several chokings. Where to go and how to get out was the only one thought leaping in my throat blocked and secured on all sides. Every wall of charred meat assured me it would be neither through the soul nor the mind, all that is of a former world, this is what each heartbeat told me. It is the body that will remain without the mind, the mind, i.e., the patient. |