broken word
Communicability has nothing to do with popularity. . . . no man is eloquent save when some one is moved as he listens.
– John Dewey, Art as Experience1
Antonin Artaud, Julio wrote, was a “broken word.” Julio deeply admired Artaud for refusing to separate his writing from his life, his imagination from his reality. He quotes Artaud at length in this obituary. He shows Artaud wanting, as a poet and an actor, to “live poetry,” to feel, on the stage, “the bodies of others moving” in unison with his own. He shows Artaud wanting the poems of Baudelaire and Poe “to become real”. He shows Artaud wanting words to jump off their pages, bearing life back into the world.
Julio dramatizes these wants in the many stories he wrote in which lies, hallucinations, dreams, tales and other inventions snake a hand into the world and begin to move the characters who witness them [Ù8, 37, 38, 40, 44, 85-88, 90]. Julio realizes Artaud’s wants when his own inventions that snake a hand into the world and begin to move the characters who witness them. “Living,” Julio writes (and one could have found this passage in writing from any time in his life), “matters more than writing unless writing is – as so few times – a way of living.” Perhaps now, with Julio’s help, we can let invention take the lead. [Ù23].”2
1 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980), p. 105.
2 Julio Cortázar, “Muerte de Antonin Artaud” [1948] Obra crítica/2 (Madrid: Alfaguar, 1994), p. 154.