Henri Michaux

• Born: May 24, 1899
• Birthplace: Namur, Belgium
• Died: October 18, 1984
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other literary forms

Apart from his verse and prose poetry, Henri Michaux (mee-SHOH) has written travelogues, essays, drama, and fiction. He is, however, equally well known as a painter. Often merging forms and genres, Michaux’s works traverse the boundaries of real and imaginary worlds, moving from outer to inner space with a constant focus on visual impressions while analyzing the experience. Michaux’s writing cannot be divorced from the visual arts, and several of his foremost collections are combinations of original drawings (gouaches, water-colors, inks, acrylics) and texts. The poems are not merely accompanied by illustrations; rather, the two are simultaneous expressions of analogous themes.

Michaux also wrote a one-act play, Le Drame des constructeurs (pb. 1930; the builder’s drama), which again reflects his interest in the visual arts. The setting is a lunatic asylum where various inmates, named A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, play “construction” games. Their guards can be seen in the background; every time one appears, the “builders” disperse. Law and order, Michaux implies, destroy imagination and deprive humanity of its ability to exist. Furthermore, the character “God” is aligned with the lunatics, whom he absolves and liberates. Ironically, the inmates continue their imaginary building, the guards remain, and nothing changes.

Another literary form that Michaux expertly handles is the aphorism. In Tranches de savoir (1950; slices of knowledge), 234 aphorisms, short-circuited proverbs, are posited. These brief phrases, in the French tradition of François La Rochefoucauld, are both sinister and amusing, for they scramble traditional sayings and reflect the themes and clichés found throughout literature. One can easily discover Molière, Jean de La Fontaine, and Charles Baudelaire reworked and answered across time and space in succinct one-line summaries of the human condition.

Michaux is especially well known for his introspective, scientific, and informative prose accounts of his experiences with mescaline and other hallucinogenic drugs. His period of drug usage lasted sixteen years (from 1955 to 1971) and produced five major essays: Misérable miracle, la mescaline (1956; Miserable Miracle, Mescaline, 1963), L’Infini turbulent (1957; Infinite Turbulence, 1975), Connaissance par les gouffres (1961; Light Through Darkness, 1963), Vents et poussières (1962; winds and dust), and Les Grandes Épreuves de l’esprit et les innombrables petites (1966; The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones, 1974). What distinguishes Michaux’s investigations from those of the historical line of French writers who have created while under the influence of drugs is his objectivity. While he appreciates the liberating effect of hallucinogens, he found them to be more revelatory than creative. His prose accounts are not “automatic writings,” in the tradition of the Surrealists, but reasoned, after-the-fact analyses of the feelings of fragmentation, alienation, energy, and elasticity of the persona.

Achievements

Henri Michaux’s achievements integrate both his literary and his artistic worlds. The poetry collection Qui je fus, Michaux’s first work published in France, received considerable critical acclaim. Although he began painting in the mid-1920’s, his first book of drawings and paintings did not appear until 1936. During the next several years, Michaux became a presence in the French world of art, and his premiere exposition of paintings and gouaches was held in the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1938. In 1941, André Gide published, in booklet form, the controversial panegyric Découvrons Henri Michaux, which revealed the modernity and complexity of Michaux’s creative process. In 1948, the Galerie René Drouin exhibited Michaux’s first collection of wash drawings and, in 1954, his premiere exposition of ink designs. In 1960, he received the Einaudi Award in Venice.

Michaux turned to yet another medium in 1963 and created, with Eric Duvivier, a film titled Images du monde visionaire. The Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris honored Michaux with a grand retrospective of his works in 1965; in the same year, he was featured by Geneviève Bonnefoi and Jacques Veinat in the film Henri Michaux ou l’espace du dedans. Also in 1965, Michaux was voted to receive the Grand Prix National des Lettres, which he decided not to accept. Both to acknowledge his literary works and to honor his refusal, the committee then chose not to award the prize that year. In 1966, a special issue of the journal L’Herne was dedicated to Michaux, and in 1976, the Fondation Maeght mounted another major retrospective exhibition of Michaux’s drawings.

Biography

Henri-Eugène-Guislain Michaux’s life, like his works, was cosmopolitan. He was born in Namur, Belgium, on May 24, 1899, and was reared in Brussels. Because of his delicate health and obstinate temperament, he was sent to a boarding school in Putte-Grasheide. After five years in the country, which was for him a time of solitude and refusal of societal norms, Michaux returned to Brussels in 1911 for the remainder of his formal education. He graduated from his lycée in 1916, but because of the German Occupation, he could not immediately enroll in a university. During this period, Michaux studied literature voraciously, learning about the lives of the saints and discovering the writings of mystics such as Jan van Ruysbroeck, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevski. Refusing to believe that literature alone held the key to the essence of life, Michaux, in 1919, enrolled in medical school, but he later abandoned his studies there as well.

At the age of twenty-one, Michaux embarked upon the first of a series of voyages that greatly influenced his life and writing. He first became a sailor on a five-masted schooner at Boulogne-sur-Mer; then he joined the crew of the ten-ton Victorieux at Rotterdam. He explored the civilizations bordering the Atlantic, including the United States and South America. Michaux stayed in Marseilles, France, for a year, then returned to Brussels, where his first volumes—Fables des origines (fables on origins) and Les Rêves et la jambe (dreams and the leg)—were published. He was, however, dissatisfied with life in Belgium, particularly with his family’s view of his “failure,” and had already moved to Paris when the two works appeared.

The Parisian artistic scene of the 1920’s had a tremendous impact on Michaux. Introduced to the Surrealists and to plastic art—primarily the paintings of Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico—he became interested in design. As early as 1927, he experimented with his own ideograms (signes), a mixing of the literary (the alphabet) and the plastic arts. Furthermore, the publication of Qui je fus in 1927 marked his break with parental and cultural authority. He traveled to South America with the poet Alfredo Gangotena and spent a year in Quito, Ecuador. In 1929, both of Michaux’s parents died, and he journeyed to Turkey, Italy, and North Africa in an effort to erase the remaining psychological influences of both his homeland and his family. The year 1930 marks the appearance of Michaux’s best-known fictional character, the humorous and pointedly emotionless Plume.

From 1930 to 1939, Michaux traveled extensively: to India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya, Indonesia, China, Korea, Japan, Portugal, Uruguay, and Brazil. These were years of important literary production, and they included Michaux’s first painting exhibition. During World War II, Michaux continued to write and draw. He experimented with various artistic techniques (watercolor and gouache) and published several volumes with original artwork. To escape the German Occupation of Paris, Michaux moved to Saint-Antonin and then to Lavandou, where he married in 1941.

His well-known anthology Selected Writings: The Space Within was published in 1944 during a time of personal tragedy. Michaux’s brother had recently died, and his wife had contracted tuberculosis. Throughout 1947, Michaux traveled in order to help his wife convalesce, but in 1948, she died from burns received in a terrible accident. Despair moved him to compose the haunting Nous deux encore (still the two of us), and in the following years, he published several significant literary collections. There was also at that time a dramatic change in Michaux’s creative direction. Removed from all family ties, he returned to his point of departure, the alphabet-sign. He wrote less and painted much more. The album Mouvements demonstrates his increased devotion to design and his personal voyage from one art form to another.

In 1955, Michaux became a naturalized French citizen. When, in 1957, he lost the use of his right hand, he trained himself to use his left hand to paint; he also embarked upon a new travel experience—the systematic use of hallucinogens to explore the inner self. The result of this experimentation was a series of essays devoted to the clinical analysis of drug-induced activity. It is important to note that during these same years, Michaux received international plaudits for his painting, and he revised and republished his major literary collections. He died in Paris on October 17, 1984, at the age of eighty-five.

Analysis

Few modern French poets have equaled the range and scope of Henri Michaux. Often contrasted with René Char, who represents a positive vision and affirmation of the creative force, Michaux is known for his humor, his destructive power that renders all generic and structural barriers useless, and his ongoing investigation of the inner self and rejection of the outer world’s conventions. Michaux’s poetry transcends national boundaries and defies specific literary schools. His strong belief in the will makes his poetic images strong and intense. Michaux is also an enigma, an ethereal go-between from one world to the next. It is through this paradox—attack countered by whimsy, delicacy balanced by audacity, the pen in tandem with the brush—that each of Michaux’s poems comes alive.

This paradox in Michaux’s writing is displayed in his use of traditionally nonpoetic literary forms—artistic commentary, drama, travelogue, proverb, and essay—as a background for his poetry. Flux, rhythm, alliteration, litany, and repetition of sounds and words may be found in any Michaux text. Furthermore, all of Michaux’s creations are self-referential and could never be considered objective nonfiction.

Ecuador

Michaux’s travelogues are a poetic voyage through both real and imaginary countries and creatures. Ecuador is the unique journal of Michaux’s travels through South America and is not to be mistaken for a traditional guidebook. Rather, it is about Michaux’s own self-discovery, a first-person narration that skips from vague, sensory perception to the specific notations of a diary, incorporating twenty-two free-verse poems, several prose essays, and entries recorded by hour and day. The importance of Ecuador, however, lies not in what Michaux sees and does, in the conventional approach to travel literature, or in the novel approach to traditional literary exoticism, but, instead, in Michaux’s explorations of his self in an effort to expand his knowledge and feeling.

A Barbarian in Asia

Similarly, A Barbarian in Asia reveals a subjective view of Michaux’s travels in the Far East. Here, Western man is revealed to be a barbarian—ignorant and unschooled, especially when faced with the refinement of Eastern civilization. In a series of short poetic essays, a “naïve” Michaux examines not “facts” but “style, gestures, accent, appearance, and reflexes” and also discovers that the Chinese originated the ideogram, his particular obsession.

Imaginary countries

Michaux has also created in his poetry/travelogue form extensive accounts of imaginary countries and characters, the best of which—Voyage en Grande Garabagne (1936; trip to Great Garabagne), Au pays de la magie (1941; in the land of magic), and Ici, Poddema (1946; here, Poddema)—are grouped together in the collection Ailleurs (1948; elsewhere). Great Garabagne is a complete civilization; it has tribes, distinct geographical locations, and social and religious customs. In these accounts, Michaux is not concerned with Utopian visions but with a reordering of reality.

He continues in the same vein with the Portrait des Meidosems (1948; Meidosems: Poems and Lithographs, 1992), in which are presented personages whom Malcolm Bowie, in his 1973 study, Henri Michaux, has accurately defined as “me-images”: shifting, self-propelled forms living in a world of continual flux.

I Am Writing to You from a Far-Off Country

In another form of imaginary travelogue, I Am Writing to You from a Far-Off Country (from Lointain intérieure, the far-off inside), Michaux wrote twelve prose-poem segments, supposedly from a feminine writer to a desired partner, thus creating both the author and the reader of the text, who interjects his own commentary. While the faraway country does not exist, its sea, waves, and unusual fauna seem real because they are described personally and because the writer is trying to persuade her companion to meet her on this imagined plane of existence. This preoccupation with travel between real and make-believe worlds permeates all Michaux’s works.

The Plume persona

In his travelogues, as in all his works, Michaux refuses to imitate the world, preferring to turn it upside down. His first fictional character, Plume (whose name means both “feather” and “pen”), is indeed a lightweight, often pathetic, creature. His form varies from text to text; he has no firm characteristics and little awareness of the world around him. As a representative of modern man, Plume symbolizes the desperate and suffering yet resilient and matter-of-fact person existing in the bleak, often hostile, world of reality. Plume is the antithesis of Michaux’s ideal; he is a victim who does not intervene, a dupe. Michaux uses humor in the Plume prose poems both to distort and to give relief. Plume cannot laugh—or at least, he does not—but the reader laughs at Plume, enjoys mocking him, and anticipates his destruction with glee.

“A Tractable Man”

In “Un Homme paisible” (“A Tractable Man”), Plume awakens to a series of disasters. The first time, he cannot find the walls of his room because ants have eaten them. Unperturbed, he falls back to sleep until his wife screams that the house has been stolen. Plume expresses disinterest and dozes off. Shortly afterward, he thinks that he hears a train, but again sleep overtakes him. When he awakens, he is very cold, covered with blood, and surrounded by various pieces of his wife. Expressing mild displeasure that the train passed by so quickly, he once more falls asleep and is abruptly disturbed by the voice of a judge who cannot decipher the mystery of Plume’s apathy. Plume does not offer a defense, and when the judge plans Plume’s execution for the following day, Plume pleads ignorance of the whole affair, excuses himself, and goes back to bed.

Michaux makes it clear that Plume richly deserves to be judged, condemned, and punished for not taking an active part in life. Each time Plume falls asleep, he repeats the Fall of Man, but Plume’s sin is far worse, because he refuses to act. Michaux’s use of the past tense in this poem expresses pessimism; man was born into a state of guilt (sleep), so he accepts his condemnation (falls back to sleep). Michaux calls upon the reader to attack Plume, to make fun of him—in short, not to identify with Plume’s “peaceful” behavior but, instead, to take charge of life. One can feel no pity for the condemned man who has faced life with total passivity. The reader’s laughter signifies his recognition of the absurdity of life and his alienation from Plume’s apathy. Michaux encourages man to struggle, to fight for existence, even though it may be a futile battle with a hostile and absurd world.

“My King”

The theme of resistance and the attitude of scorn for man’s paralysis are reiterated in the prose poem “Mon Roi” (“My King”), in the collection La Nuit remue (night on the move). Night, a time of apparitions and hallucinations, is the traditional period of sleep (bitterly attacked in the Plume pieces) and is a static and noncombative time for humanity, which is defeated at night. Michaux wishes to stir humankind to motion, to agitate people, to force them to participate. In the poem, it is during the night that an unnamed first-person narrator attacks a character he calls “my King,” the figure of a super proprietor who is unique and powerful. The narrator strangles and shakes the King, laughs in his face, throws him on the ground, slaps him, and kicks him. However, the King does not move, his blue visage returns to normal, and every night he returns to the chamber of the narrator. The King is always seemingly victorious, but he cannot exist without a subject, while his subject, who is also a victim, cannot rid himself of the King. Like Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, the narrator can acquire dignity and purpose only when in continual motion and revolt.

Michaux uses the present tense in “My King” to indicate that humanity’s struggle never ends. This is the human condition wherein liberty is both necessary and impossible; the battle itself is what counts. Michaux’s violent style, his use of the shock technique, and his refusal to reproduce the real constitute his call to action, his attack on society, and his indictment of humanity, which contains within itself two spirits: one, domineering and parasitic; the other, impotent and inert, a mere spectator of life. Humanity must not be resigned to this dilemma, Michaux asserts, for the only promise of salvation is in action.

“Clown”

The poem “Clown” (in the collection Peintures) is a brilliant summary of Michaux’s poetic vision. A clown is a fool, a jester who paints on a ridiculous face, the caricature of a human being. What amuses the spectator about a clown, as he performs his zany antics, is the viewer’s own superiority to the buffoon’s mishaps, clumsiness, and inability to cope with the world. The clown exists in an absurd universe. He trips, he fumbles, he uncovers the unexpected, he pops in and out of boxes too small to contain human beings. His ludicrous nature, the “laughable,” is dependent upon a reaction from the viewer; likewise, the spectator’s appreciation and self-importance rest on the existence of the clown, his victim. People’s laughter is therefore grotesque. On the other hand, the clown is not known as an individual but as a force. He is free in that he breaks with convention and logical order, going about the “expected” in his own way. Clowns make life more bearable by the creative energy of their destruction. Michaux’s clown states that he will “chop off, upset, break, topple and purge” the “miserable modesty, miserable dichotomy” of his shackles.

Michaux’s use of future tense in this poem is extremely important. In addition to lending urgency and a sense of power, it underscores the intolerable present and the interdependency of clown and audience. The jester must rid himself of his “worthy fellow-beings,” his “look-alikes,” to find the essence of a new and incredible freshness and purity (rosée). The sound of the word rosée, however, reveals a layer of deep pessimism and sets the tone for the ambiguous conclusion of the poem. A rosé is also a wine, potent as well as a cross between red and white, suggesting the very duality that the clown hopes to escape. Furthermore, Michaux indicates that the final revelation is nul (void) et ras (and blank) et risible (and ludicrous, laughable). After finally marshaling the strength and determination to discover what he might attain, the clown may find nothing but a vacuum—the final laugh.

Bibliography

Bowie, Malcolm. Henri Michaux. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1973. A critical study of Michaux’s literary works. Includes bibliographic references.

Broome, Peter. Henri Michaux. London: Athlone Press, 1977. A short critical assessment of the works of Michaux. Includes an index and bibliography.

Hellerstein, Nina S. “Calligraphy, Identity: Scriptural Exploration as Cultural Adventure.” Symposium 45, no. 1 (Spring, 1991): 329. A critical comparison of the works of Paul Claudel and Michaux traces each writer’s fascination with Chinese and Japanese writing systems.

Kawakami, Akane. “Barbarian Travels: Textual Positions in Un Barbare en Asie.” Modern Language Review 95, no. 4 (October, 2000): 978-991. A Barbarian in Asia is not so much a collection of Michaux’s views on Asia as the trace of his passage through it. There is a complex relationship between Michaux and these Asian cultures that requires a more subtle explanatory model than the dualistic one of hegemony.

La Charité, Virginia A. Henri Michaux. Boston: Twayne, 1977. An introductory biography and critical study of selected works by Michaux. Includes bibliographic references.

Parish, Nina. Henri Michaux: Experimentation with Signs. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Examines Michaux’s use of signs in the works Mouvements, Par le voix des rhythmes, Saisir, and Par des traits.

Rigaud-Drayton, Margaret. Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. The author argues that Michaux’s work, both verbal and graphic, is a quest for a universal language or sign.

Rowlands, Esther. Redefining Resistance: The Poetic Wartime Discourses of Francis Ponge, Benjamin Peret, Henri Michaux, and Antonin Artaud. New York: Rodopi, 2004. Presents a critique of linguistic resistance in the poetic texts compiled between 1936 and 1946 of Michaux, Ponge, Peret, and Artaud.