Letter on Lautreamont
...One point I insist on is that Isidore Ducasse [Lautreamont] was neither madman nor visionary, but a genius who never ceased as long as he lived to see with perfect lucidity when he observed and poked around in the fallow and yet unploughed furrows of the unconscious. His own, that is, and nobody else's; for there are no points in our body where we can commune with a collective consciousness. We are alone, all alone, in our body. But the world has never admitted this and it has always wished to retain for itself some means of scrutinizing more closely the consciousness of all great poets, and everybody wants to get inside everybody else's mind so as to know what everybody else is up to.
And one day certain persons, not highborn kinsmen, as in Edgar Poe's Annabel Lee, but mean scabs of being, the itch of all that is eaten up with envy, came whispering to Isadore Ducasse up alongside his bed and his head at the head of his deathbed: 'You are a genius, but I am the genius that inspires your consciousness, and it is I who write your poems inside you, before you even think of them, and better than you ever could.' And so it was that Isidore Ducasse died of rage for having wished, like Edgar Poe, Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Gerard de Nerval, to preserve his intrinsic individuality instead of becoming like Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Blaise Pascal or Chateaubriand, the funnel of everybody's thoughts...
1946
p.127
Artaud, Antonin, Lettre sur Lautreamont, in Cahiers du Sud, no. 275.
Oevres Completes, Gallimard Paris, 1956.
trns. David Rattray, Anthology, City Lights, San Francisco, 1965.
Artaud in the catalog
Lautreamont in the catalog