Book Review: Life in the Folds by Henri Michaux, Translated by Darren Jackson

Life in the Folds
Poems by Henri Michaux, trans. by Darren Jackson
Wakefield Press, March 2016
$14.95; 168 pp
ISBN-13: 978-1939663061
Reviewed by Dan Shurley

“I haven’t done much harm to anyone in life. I’ve only desired to. Soon I no longer desired to. I had satisfied my desire.” The confessor of these lines no longer desires to crush his enemies’ skulls because he’s devised a way to do so in his mind, as often as he wants, to his exact specifications, and at no risk to his personal liberty. He’s found what an optimistic therapist might call an outlet. Such a confession of imagined crimes typifies “Freedom of Action,” the first part of Henri Michaux’s Life in the Folds, a collection of prose poems and nightmarish travelogues deftly translated by Darren Jackson.

The Belgian-born poet of psychic discomfort dispenses with his adversaries (as well as his misguided admirers) with mordant wit and, he assures us in “Satisfied Desires,” “with the requisite care and disinterest (without which it isn’t art).” Without which these studies of impotent rage and vindictiveness taken to absurd lengths would be alarming and sad only. This anti-hero invents ingenious ways to even the score with anyone and anything that ever got in his way. There’s the sausage cellar for pompous military officials, plaster for loudmouths, apartment thunder for noisy neighbors, the skewer for dinner guests who’ve outworn their welcome and the man-sling:

I also have my man-sling. You can shoot men with it far, really far. You have to know how to load them.

Yet it’s difficult to shoot them far enough. Quite frankly, they never get shot far enough. Sometimes they come back forty years later, as you’re thinking you can at last feel at ease, when they’re the ones at ease, returning with the even step of someone in no hurry, someone who could have been there five minutes ago and was to return right after.

The playful mood doesn’t last very long. In the next part the poet turns his powers of invention squarely against himself, starting with the destruction of the body. A body besieged by abstract assailants, a barely self-contained body on the brink of “subjectless horror” is no laughing matter. The prose poems that make up “Apparitions”—the longest part of the book—read like the diary of an invalid weathering another mental break. The subject finds himself on the receiving end of a succession of strange and invasive surgical procedures involving buzz saws, sabers, and flesh-sculpting lasers. For variety there’s the constellation of pinpricks, the demolition workshop and the sea of breasts. These bad trips suggest a view of the body as a passive repository of suffering, filled with organs that can and will revolt.

Yet it’s not the pain itself but the potential for pain, amplified by runaway reason, that plagues the subject of “The Danger of the Association of Thoughts” and “Circulating Through My Body”:

So I circulated through my panic-stricken body in anguish, provoking shocks, arrests, groans. I woke my kidneys and they hurt. I woke my colon, it pinched; my heart, it unsheathed. I would undress at night and, trembling, inspect my skin, waiting for the pain that was going to pierce it.

Sontag wrote of Antonin Artaud: “The Surrealists heralded the benefits that would accrue from unlocking the gates of reason, and ignored the abominations … While the Surrealists proposed exquisite games with consciousness which no one could lose, Artaud was engaged in a mortal struggle to ‘restore’ himself.” Artaud’s struggle was a literal one. He was confined to asylums where he underwent shock therapy and, at the urging of his psychiatrist, took up the pen again in an effort to exorcise his demons.

Outside events rarely appear in Michaux’s work in a recognizable way, with the notable exception of an account of his wife’s death—she died in a horrific fire—in “Old Age of Pollagoras,” included in this volume.

Interestingly, Andre Gide championed both Artaud and Michaux. The kind of unflinching intellectual honesty Gide espoused—Artaud called it “cruelty”— isn’t for everyone. There are plenty of occasions for offense-taking in Life in the Folds, like this parting shot from “Satisfied Desires,” which seems calibrated for maximum provocation:

My heart periodically emptied of its spite opens up to goodness, and you could almost trust me with a little girl for a few hours. Probably nothing unfortunate would happen to her. Who knows? She might even be reluctant to leave me…

Even humor—our best defense against the absurd—gives way under the weight of sustained, harrowing introspection. When Michaux’s avatars express joy, as infrequently as that happens in this book, it feels unexpected, almost begrudging, and it always has to do with freedom. “The infernal effort to always remain a man, and here I am liberated from it,” one of his surrogates exclaims in disbelief. What a rare feeling indeed.

Dan Shurley is the author of Collective Regeneration and Universal Love, a chapbook published by Nomadic Press in September 2015. His critical writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Collagist, Nomadic Journal and Hidden City. His interests in hacking and hippie modernism brought him to San Francisco, where he works as a web producer.