ARTAUD Antonin. Lot n° 45

L'ARVE ET L'AUME. DODU MAFFLU. CORRECTED PAPERS SIGNED BY ARTAUD. 37 pages in-4 AND AUTOGRAPHIC LETTER SIGNED. Paris, March 23, 1947. 8 pages in-4 in ink, signed twice by Artaud. All addressed to Marc Barbezat. Antonin Artaud writes in Rodez in 1943 and corrects "L'Arve et l'Aume" in 1946, whose central character is "Dodu Mafflu". He maintains that Lewis Carroll was inspired by him, and that Dodu Mafflu can be found in the guise of "Humpty Dumpty", the egg-shaped character in chapter 6 of Alice in Wonderland. ... Here are the proofs of Dodu Mafflu, which I'm sending back to you now. There must be a page missing at the end, it must be the penultimate page, you will restore the text yourself, the blank words must be left blank, there must be a warning in all. As an introduction, you can publish the letter I wrote to you, in which I suggest the subtitle "Antigrammatical enterprise about and against Lewis Carroll". In the corrected proofs, Artaud mentions "Tentative antigrammaticale contre Lewis Carroll par Antonin Artaud". This subtitle will be crossed out. ... When I read Lewis Carroll's little poem about fish, being, obedience, the principle of the sea and God's revelation of a blinding truth, I have the feeling that it was I who had thought and written this little poem in other centuries, and that I found my own work in Lewis Carroll's hands, for one does not meet another on points like being and obeying or living and existing. My notebooks, written in Rodez during my three years of internment, showed everyone that I had never read Lewis Carroll, written in complete ignorance... The last sentence of the corrected proofs reads: "If you don't like all this, you can choose one of these sentences as a title, for example: Momar uni or gonpar arak alac eli". In his own hand, Artaud adds: Which means: Have you understood? Antonin Artaud. Exceptional set.