"All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth"
About this Quote
Artaud doesn’t flatter language as a clean tool for exchanging ideas; he drags it into the gutter and makes it bodily. “All true language” being “incomprehensible” is a provocation aimed straight at bourgeois faith in clarity, reason, and polite interpretation. He’s not praising confusion for its own sake. He’s arguing that the most honest speech comes from places that can’t be comfortably translated: pain, hunger, ecstasy, terror. Meaning, for Artaud, is less a message than an event.
The image does the real work. “The chatter of a beggar’s teeth” is involuntary sound: teeth clicking from cold, deprivation, illness. It’s language stripped of intention, stripped of audience management. That’s the subtext: modern society treats the raw signals of suffering as noise, and then congratulates itself for preferring “articulate” speech. Artaud flips that hierarchy. The beggar’s chatter is “true” precisely because it isn’t curated; it’s the body testifying when the mind’s rhetoric fails.
Context matters. Artaud’s theatre project (the Theatre of Cruelty) wanted to break drama’s dependency on literature and psychology - to replace neat dialogue with cries, rhythms, gestures, and shock, forcing spectators to feel before they interpret. His own life - illness, addiction, psychiatric confinement - also haunts the line: the “incomprehensible” isn’t an aesthetic pose so much as a record of what it’s like to be unheard, or to speak from a place language can’t civilize.
The image does the real work. “The chatter of a beggar’s teeth” is involuntary sound: teeth clicking from cold, deprivation, illness. It’s language stripped of intention, stripped of audience management. That’s the subtext: modern society treats the raw signals of suffering as noise, and then congratulates itself for preferring “articulate” speech. Artaud flips that hierarchy. The beggar’s chatter is “true” precisely because it isn’t curated; it’s the body testifying when the mind’s rhetoric fails.
Context matters. Artaud’s theatre project (the Theatre of Cruelty) wanted to break drama’s dependency on literature and psychology - to replace neat dialogue with cries, rhythms, gestures, and shock, forcing spectators to feel before they interpret. His own life - illness, addiction, psychiatric confinement - also haunts the line: the “incomprehensible” isn’t an aesthetic pose so much as a record of what it’s like to be unheard, or to speak from a place language can’t civilize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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