I am happy to do this, since Artaud is one of my culture heroes. For those interested in reading his work, I suggest taking a look at the small anthology put out by City Lights. His work is violent, anarchic, and vicious in its hatred of the bourgeois life-style he and the Surrealsits hoped to undermine via anarchic works of art. Breton said Artaud went _through_ the mirror, referring to the mirror art holds up to nature. One can see Artaud's esthetic at work in Peter Brooks' ensemble, Theater of Cruelty. Brooks' production of King Lear reflects the indluence of Artaud. Interestingly enough, Artaud himself identified the early Marx Brothers movies as closest to his vision of the a Theater of Cruelty. At the end of his life, Artaud made a trk to Mexico where he visited the Tarahumara Indians and participated in the Peyote ritural. His booklet on the visit, and all of his later work is extremely interesting in its incorporation of Peyote hallaucinations and symbolism.
chuck miller
> *****
>
> Perhaps there are others on this list who have little acquaintance with
> various people in the French intellectual world who have come up in recent
> discussions, such as Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Bataille, and Artaud. I have
> read a little Foucault, and none of the other people.
>
> So as not to get left behind entirely, I have tried to catch up on my
> reading. I have just finished a small volume on Artaud. In fact it is a
> book by Martin Esslin, who appears to be a bourgeois academic scholar of
> the theatre who has written on people like Beckett and Pinter.
>
> The book, entitled _Artaud_, 1976: London, is one of the "Fontana Modern
> Masters" series, which seems to be composed of small summaries of the life
> and thought of various Famous Men of the 20th century, and yes, as far as I
> can tell, they ARE all Men. Not very fair to the women, especially since
> Mailer and Lawrence (D.H., I suspect) are on the list. They are not all
> 20th century Men actually. Among the politicals on this list are "Marx" by
> David McLellan, "Chomsky" by John Lyons, "Fanon" by David Caute, "Guevara"
> by Andrew Sinclair, "Trotsky" by Irving Howe, and [YIPES, to quote Klo]
> "Lenin" by Robert Conquest!!! (Probably NOT the dispassionate alternative
> to Ulam's book that we were seeking. ;-) )
>
> The reader being forewarned about some of the possible sources of bias, I
> proceed.
>
> Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was an actor (stage and cinema), poet,
> playwright, theatrical producer, and essayist. However, mainly he was one
> of those artistic people who have strange and appalling lives - sort of
> like Warhol, Mishima, and (perhaps most closely) Basquiat (this is a great
> film btw). To speak with the voice of mainstream psychology for the moment:
> he was psychoneurotic for his entire adult life, and completely psychotic
> for the period from 1937 probably to the end of his life. To speak with the
> voice of antipsychiatry: he was labelled as "mad", imprisoned, and tortured
> with electroshock. Artaud rejected Marxism and his writings and life were
> profoundly individualistic and nihilistic.
>
> Artaud spent the period from 1915 to 1919 in and out of sanatoria for a
> "nervous ailment." In 1919 he began to take opiates for "headaches" and was
> addicted to them for the rest of his life.
>
> During the 1920's Artaud mostly supported himself as an actor on stage and
> in the cinema, including such films as "Napoleon" and "The Passion of Joan
> of Arc". In his stage acting he showed talent but was somewhat hindered by
> the unorthodox way he would sometimes portray characters. The author
> reports that on one occasion, rehearsing the role of Charlemagne, he
> entered the stage on all fours and crawled toward the throne like an
> animal. When the director objected, he stood up and contemptuously
> remarked, "Oh, well, if you're sticking with truthfulness..!" ("Oh! Si vous
> travaillez dans la verite! Alors!")
>
> In 1923 he tried to get some of his poetry published in the avant-garde
> Nouvelle Revue Francaise. When they rejected it, he argued the point in
> letters to the editor along the following lines: "I have a nervous ailment
> which makes it impossible for me to put down in words what I see. I know
> that this makes my poetry inferior. But, doesn't that make it more valuable
> than ordinary people's poetry, which does not come out of such a struggle?
> The point is that words can't adequately express experience anyway, so my
> poetry, which acknowledges its inadequacy, is better than other works which
> hypocritically pretend to express the truth about emotion and being." (My
> paraphrase.) "Where others want to produce works of art, I aspire for no
> more than to display my own spirit." (Artaud) This correspondence was
> published and won him some literary reputation.
>
> In 1925 Artaud joined the Surrealist movement (which was a circle with a
> definite membership). Editing an issue of their journal, he published
> letters to the Pope and to the Chancellors of European Universities in
> postmodern style, denouncing their western logic:
>
> Europe crystallizes and slowly mummifies under the chains of its frontiers,
> its factories, its law courts, its universities. The frozen Spirit cracks
> under the slabs of stone which press upon it. It's the fault of your mouldy
> systems, your logic of two and two makes four, it is your fault, University
> Chancellors, caught in the nets of your own syllogisms. You produce
> engineers, judges, doctors unable to grasp the true mysteries of the body,
> the cosmic laws of being, false scientists blind to the world beyond the
> Earth, philosophers who pretend they can reconstruct the Spirit...
>
> This letter was reproduced as a leaflet by the rebellious students of the
> Sorbonne in 1968!! I doubt if Foucault could boast as much.
>
> Shortly after this, however, in 1926, he was expelled by the Surrealists,
> who were joining the Communist Party. He responded with a pamphlet: "Did
> not Surrealism die the day when Breton and his adepts thought they had to
> join Communism and to seek, in the realm of fact and matter, the
> fulfillment of an endeavour which could not normally develop anywhere but
> in the inner recesses of the brain?" Artaud believed that Marxism was just
> another form of Western rationalism. "Artaud insisted that the social,
> material, external plane was of no interest to him because it was only a
> pale reflection of inner realities." (Esslin)
>
> Around this time, Artaud began to develop his ideas for a radically new
> type of theatre. In a manifesto launching the Theatre Alfred Jarry, he
> called for a theatre which would be not just "play" but a "genuine event."
> A theatrical performance should be like a police raid on a brothel; it
> should be addressed to "the whole existence" of the audience. Ultimately
> people "will go to the theatre as [they] go to the surgeon or the dentist."
>
> Parenthetically, this programme reminds me a lot of a thing that a friend
> of mine and I came up with many years ago as undergrads at Cornell which we
> called the "Theatre of the Social Psychology Experiment." We were not
> influenced by Artaud; we were working independently! The idea was to do
> strange things to the audience and see how they reacted. It was sort of
> like Candid Camera, come to think of it. (Was Allen Funt influenced by
> Artaud???? Hmmm!) As an example, in the middle of the second act of the
> play the audience might hear, from the back of the theatre: "THE BOX OFFICE
> IS BEING ROBBED! THE BOX OFFICE IS BEING - NO! NO!!" **BANG!!** **BANG!!**
> "Uuuuuuuuurrrrrrggghhhhhhh..." The actors would, with apparent insincerity,
> attempt to calm the audience. A lot of improvisation would follow.
>
> Anyway, back to Artaud! The Theatre Alfred Jarry did a few experimental
> things. Esslin describes one performance, the first half of which was a
> showing of the (banned) Soviet film _Mother_, and the second half of which
> was a dull and vacuous scene being presented "without the author's
> permission." At the end Artaud revealed that the author was Claudel, a
> Christian playwright who was also an ambassador, whom Artaud denounced as
> an "infamous traitor!"
>
> Next, however, Artaud put on a Strindberg play with the cooperation and
> support of the Swedish embassy. This incensed the Surrealists, who came to
> the first performance en masse. Esslin writes, "Furious that Artaud had
> accepted subsidies from a foreign government and allied himself with the
> cream of society, these Surrealist interlopers hurled insults at the actors
> about being in the pay of Swedish capitalism. Artaud replied from the stage
> that he had only agreed to produce it because Strindberg himself had been a
> victim of the Swedish establishment. At this some Swedes walked out of the
> theatre. It was a memorable scene." It was fun to go to the theatre in
> those days!! At the next performance, Artaud fingered the Surrealists who
> tried to get in, pointing them out to the police.
>
> The Theatre Alfred Jarry eventually folded. Artaud scraped along on his
> acting money, which he supplemented by writing false travel articles. In
> 1931 Artaud saw an exhibition of Balinese dancing, which much affected him.
> This, he became convinced, was the model for his new type of theatre:
> little speech, no stage setting, reliance on music, sounds, gestures, and
> costume, surrounding the audience, affecting it by non-verbal and
> non-rational means. He began writing the essays on the theatre which were
> later published as "The Theatre and its Double." The 'double' is life itself.
>
> In 1932 he wrote the First Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty. The name
> "Theatre of Cruelty" reflected the uncompromising approach which he
> proposed to take to the audience: "I intend to do to the audience what
> snake-charmers do and to make them reach even the subtlest notions through
> their organism." The actors in the theatre would also suffer, being cruel
> to themselves, and reach the audience emotionally through the sincerity of
> their own suffering. The writer would be unimportant. The individual actors
> would be unimportant; they would gesture and move and speak or make sounds
> according to a precisely pre-arranged scheme, like playing the roll of a
> player piano. (My note: this means that the producer is the only one in the
> building with any autonomy.)
>
> Around this time, Artaud fell in love with Anais Nin, who writes of him at
> this time: "The theatre for him is a place to shout pain, anger, hatred, to
> enact the violence within us ... He is the drugged, contracted being who
> walks always alone, who is seeking to produce plays which are like scenes
> of torture. ... He talked with fire about the Kabala, magic, myths, legends
> .." He was writing a book called "Heliogabalus or the Crowned Anarchist,"
> about the homosexual and perverse Roman emperor; some critics see this as
> an autobiographical work.
>
> In 1935 the Theatre of Cruelty presented its first and only work, "The
> Cenci", by Artaud. It was a big flop. Apparently it had many problems,
> including the fact that the female lead was not a professional actress but
> one of the financial backers. This was a tremendous blow to Artaud, and
> apparently sent him off the rails. He ceased to try to create organized
> "theatres". He wrote, "I no longer believe in being associated with others
> ... because I no longer believe in the purity of mankind." After this his
> life and projects became truly non-normal.
>
> Artaud spent most of 1936 traveling to Mexico to study the life and peyote
> ceremonies of the Tarahumara people. On his return, he became increasingly
> preoccupied with magic, miraculous signs, and magical objects. A friend had
> given him an Irish walking staff. He became convinced that it was the very
> staff with which St. Patrick had driven the snakes out of Ireland, and had
> great powers. While studying the Tarot, he had a revelation of the end of
> the world. He wrote a brochure called "The New Revelations of Being"
> foretelling the destruction of civilization by Fire, Water, Earth and 'a
> Star which will occupy the entire surface of the air, in which the Spirit
> of Man had been immersed.' 'On the 7th of November (1937) the Destruction
> explodes in Lightning. The Tortured Man becomes, for the whole World, the
> Recognized One, the Revealed One.'
>
> To meet this cataclysm, he decided he had to go to western Ireland, the
> country of St. Patrick, where his staff had come from. He wandered
> aimlessly around there and ran out of money. He believed that his staff was
> "Jesus Christ's own baton and it is Jesus Christ who commands me, and all
> that I shall do; and it will be seen that His teaching was for Metaphysical
> Heroes and not for idiots." Artaud apparently could not speak English. In
> September, 1937, he was arrested in Dublin; the author guesses that he was
> trying to get into a monastery where there might be "French-speaking
> monks." He was detained for six days and put on a ship for Le Havre. On
> board, he attacked two crew members who were carrying tools, whom he
> believed were trying to harm him. He was subdued and put in a strait
> jacket. On September 30, he arrived in Le Havre, and the French authorities
> confined him as a dangerous lunatic.
>
> Artaud spend the next nine years in mental institutions. His letters became
> full of wild conspiracy theories and persecution fantasies (although of
> course he was in fact being held captive. Furthermore, as the Germans
> occupied northern France, it became clear that they actually were killing
> the "insane."). He wrote that Jews and the French police were in league
> with "initiates" of secret societies to deprive him of the opiates that the
> needed. He wrote that the French police collected the semen of millions of
> hypnotized people to poison him with. He wrote that all the sins and filth
> of the world were being borne by him. He became convinced that sex was
> evil. He wrote that originally people had been created without sex and
> without the need to defecate; food was eliminated by 'lumbar evaporation.'
> It was during this period that he dedicated one of his books to Hitler.
> (Whose agents had the power of life and death over Artaud at the time, I
> suppose we have to remember.)
>
> To save his life, his friends and family arranged for him to be moved to
> another institution in Vichy France. At this new location, Artaud was
> subjected to electroshock treatment. The doctor in charge claimed that this
> treatment greatly improved his behavior and "was dispelling his obsessions
> and delusions," and his writing after 1945 does seem more lucid and less
> delusive, by conventional standards.
>
> In 1946 a committee of artists raised funds for his support and won his
> release. He returned to Paris and did a lot of writing. One of his most
> influential pieces, a reaction to a Van Gogh exhibition and to a criticism
> of it, was "Van Gogh, le suicide' de society" (Van Gogh, suicide-d by
> society). This was a polemic against psychiatry, which influenced Laing,
> Szasz, Foucault, and the whole debate over "insanity".
>
> In 1947 he was given permission to prepare a radio broadcast. He prepared a
> tape of a "radiophonic poem" with four voices, xylophone, and percussion.
> In the text, Artaud said that he had "heard about a plan according to which
> the United States, afraid that they would be lacking cannon-fodder for
> future wars .. were stockpiling the sperm of little boys about to enter
> school in deep frozen form to be used in artificial insemination for the
> subsequent production of soldiers. In another passage God was called no
> more than shit and ridicule was heaped on the Mass as well as Jesus
> Christ." The government refused to air the tape.
>
> Artaud died of cancer in 1948.
>
> Well, how do we react to this? Of course we could just say "this guy was a
> lunatic and we don't have to pay any attention to him, either to debate his
> theories or to condemn his anti-Communism, anti-Semitism, or praise of
> Hitler." But of course Artaud disagrees. He claimed throughout that he was
> NOT insane. Isn't there an argument to be made that, to deal with Artaud
> with dignity, we have to take him at his word and take his fascist
> tendencies as being authentic? That anything less is impermissible
> paternalism and discrimination? That it would have been better to shoot him
> as a fascist than to electroshock him to forcibly "cure" his "madness"? (I
> know there is PLENTY of debate over such issues. Most people affected by
> schizophrenia feel it as a serious disability, not as liberating vision.
> Whether this is solely the product of social pressure or not is the subject
> of debate among those affected.)
>
> In any case, Artaud was not any more mad than the next avant-garde artist
> for much of the time from 1921 to 1935, say. So we can look at Artaud's
> stuff from that period more dispassionately. And I think it's fair to say
> that the fascist tendencies are there -as well-. There is the desire to
> smash all convention: but from the right or the left? Communists and Nazis
> both want to smash bourgeois conventions.
>
> Looking closely at the "theatre of cruelty", you see a situation in which
> the actors and the audience are all being manipulated by a single will. The
> will is Artaud's. Is this not a fascist dream? Of course Artaud here and
> there likened the all-encompassing nature of his "theatre" to folk
> festivals and religious rituals. But those involve the conscious and
> willing participation of the populace; they break down the
> producer/actor/audience categories (the folk festivals anyway). They aren't
> like "going to the dentist." They aren't "cruelty." Isn't this
> individualistic transforming artistry very much like the "theatre" of
> Nazism itself: the symbols, the sounds, the "Sieg Heils", the Nuremburg
> rally of 1936, Leni Reifenstahl's cinema, etc.? I think so.
>
> In capitalist society, artists like Artaud are a segment of the
> petty-bourgeoisie. If they accept the conventions and rules of society,
> they are pulled in two ways: to be successful bourgeois themselves (Stephen
> King, Madonna, Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas) or compliant proletarians
> (like many fameless actors, actresses, commercial artists, and so on). If
> they oppose and denounce the established order, they are still pulled in
> two ways. They can join with the workers and oppressed and add their
> creativity to the collective struggle; but this means sacrificing the
> petty-bourgeois individualist illusion that they can remake the world
> through their own efforts. Or: they can reject other people, cling to that
> very illusion, and attempt to destroy society as an unaided individual;
> which is, to be a super-being, to have godlike power. This is madness even
> if you don't have schizophrenia. It's a fascist fantasy.
>
> Therefore I think the Sorbonne students really WERE incautious when they
> reprinted Artaud's leaflet in 1968. (Esslin also criticizes them, but from
> the right; he says they didn't suffer as Artaud did and were just shouting
> for no reason basically.)
>
> Just some personal thoughts,
>
> Louis Paulsen
>
> Louis Proyect
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)