L'Espace du dedans: paesaggi corporei e psichici in Artaud, Michaux e Noel

The French poetry of the 20th century, in the wake of the Surrealist and especially para-Surrealist influence of the Le Grand Jeu and Bataille, has resolutely explored the organic and physical dimension of the im- aginary in an anti-idealistic and anti-aesthetic sense. Antonin Artaud’s (1896-1948) texts, with the intent of “restarting the body” by emptying it of the waste of mental illness and the crisis of language, paved the way to a radicalization, also scatological, of the approach to the body, which became the site of bloody and cruel sacrificial rites; Henri Michaux (1899-1984), giving life to imaginary peoples and psychic explorations of both exotic and interior geographical spaces (Ecuador, Asia) due to the experimentation of the effects of mescaline on literary and artis- tic creation, created a parallel reality imbued with Lautréamontian vi- olence; Bernard Noël (1930-2021), through the exploration of «small physical states» (Extraits du corps, 1958, Une machine à voir, 2019), sought to grasp in interior space the possible physical and organic ma- trix of thought and word, a kind of geography of being-body-language.