Most of us will be surprised that the letters, journals, poems, essays, and various writing projects that comprise the complete works of Antonin Artaud from Gallimard, as edited by Paule Thévenin (a project still incomplete as of this date), so far run to more than twenty-five published volumes! (Some of these are themselves double, with an “a” and a “b” tome.) Looking at them, one feels one is looking at the opera omnia of some 19th Century literary Titan, a Balzac or, perhaps, a Dumas. Could this really be the production of the sickly, deranged Artaud, who comes to us either as the handsome young actor of the ’20s or the frail ghoul of his final years — the ’40s? Dipping here and there among them, however, the reader soon finds that the voluminous poetry, from the 1923 pamphlet Backgammon in the Sky (Tric Trac du del) to The Return of Artaud, le Mômo (Le Retour d’Artaud, le Mômo: “mômo” may also refer to the Greek god Momos, the god of raillery and satire) in 1947, is pained almost beyond endurance — and largely unreadable. In April 1929 Artaud had registered a film script based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae and also published a book of essays, Art and Death. In May of 1933, he’d completed a surrealistic dithyram- bic novel, Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned (published 1934). Known as a revolutionary man of the theater, Artaud nevertheless completed only a single full-length play, and that a cut-down prose adaptation of a closet drama of Shelley’s, by way of a translation of Stendahl’s, The Cenci It is an interesting play, but the interest is almost entirely because Artaud wrote it. A costume historical drama, it looks and feels very similar to a number of works by Cocteau, Giraudoux, Anouilh, and Gelderhode. But it does not work anywhere near as well on stage as the best theater pieces of these other writers.
Artaud wrote some praiseful, mystical essays on Mexico’s Tarahumara Indians (1937), which, for all their glorification of the primitive, are nevertheless almost wholly fascist in their presuppositions — in much the same way as Riefenstahl’s photographic and textual glorifications of the African Nuba tribe are still the underside of the theory of a (if not the) “master race.”
As an actor, a young Artaud had appeared in numerous plays, notably as Tiresias in the scandalous production of Cocteau’s Antigone (1922), with its sets by Pablo Picasso, costumes by Coco Chanel, and music by Arthur Honegger. (Genica Athanasiou, Artaud’s lover at the time, played the title role.) He made brief appearances in two great films: He is Marat in Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) and the young monk in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). There are numerous less distinguished screen roles — at least one of which was in a movie popular with the public for a season, Raymond Bernard’s Tarakanova (1929); and in 1930 he had acted in the French version (unfortunately not the well-known German one with Lotte Lenya) of Pabst’s film of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, as well as Fritz Lang’s Liliom (1934) — in America, the Molnar play of the same name on which the film was based would become Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical Carousel.
There are many brilliant and impassioned letters, journals, brief and luminous notes on theatrical projects, films, and what-have-you.
And there are the handful of lucid and superbly analytical essays.
The most important of these are collected in the 1938 volume The Theater and Its Double, the single work without which (1923-24’s Correspondence with Jacques Rivière excepted) the encounter with Artaud would be almost entirely an encounter with a myth — rather than with a mind.
The double of the theater is, of course, life; and Artaud considered himself deliberately provocative by relegating life to the subordinate position in his title. Still, the book begins with as socially ethical a preface as any Marxist might wish:
I must remark that the world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and that the attempt to orient toward culture thoughts turned only toward hunger is a purely artificial expedient.
But even this most lucid and socially pointed of all Artaud’s works gets under way with a kind of feuilletonage noire, in which theater grows, somehow, mystically, out of the Plague at Marseille in 1720, and ends up in… acupuncture! The trip between, however, is brilliant — hugely rich in notions about theater and the general contemporary artistic condition. The wonderful central essay “No More Masterpieces” could stand (and has stood) as a manifesto for the working twentieth-century artist ever since it was written — and makes the modernist criticism of Eliot from the same period, if not Pound’s, seem timid and rather trifling. Still, there is no single and entire book-length work — whether poems, drama, fiction, or, like this one, essays — from Artaud that can be securely and unquestionably accepted into the canon so cavalierly dubbed “literature.” Presumably this would not have bothered him.
“All writing is garbage,” Artaud had declared in his 1925 meditation-cum-prose-poem, “Le Pèse-Nerfs” (“The Nerve-Meter”), and went on writing poems and letters.
How, then, can we account for Artaud’s extraordinary influence? In 1947, a young American, Carl Solomon, went to a reading given by Artaud on the rue Jacob. Back in the United States, “…in my incarceration in a psychiatric hospital in Manhattan [The Psychiatric Institute],” Solomon wrote in 1989, “… I encountered Allen Ginsberg, a fellow patient who was intrigued by my collection of Paris-acquired books. Among the Artaud, Genêt, Michaux, Miller, and Lautréamont was Isou’s Nouvelle Poesie et un Nouvelle Musique. We discussed all of these things by way of layering the groundwork for Allen’s eventual publication of ’Howl’ in 1956.” But how better to characterize “Howl” than as the textual encounter of Artaud with Whitman? And the earliest works of Artaud to be published in the United States were through City Lights and Grove Press, the two publishing outlets most closely associated with Ginsberg and the Beats. But if one can map the conduits by which Artaud arrived on the American shore, that still does not let us know the specificity of what arrived, besides an atmosphere, an air, a stance. Again, looking for the substance behind that influence, if one turns to the works least tainted by his inarguable dementia — his plays and his essays — the whole phenomenon simply does not make sense.
There is much in The Cenci at one with the wilder of Artaud’s works: the interest in crime, transgression, and cruelty presented in an atmosphere dominated by aphoristic intellectual analysis. But there are works by Artaud both earlier and later (and less aesthetically satisfying overall) in which (nevertheless) it is exactly these elements, which certainly supply the energy behind Artaud, that appear so much more forcefully. Indeed, to consider Artaud’s subsequent influence only in the light of this one play and the more logical and readable essays on art and theater simply will not do, for all their essayistic brilliance. It is as if Wagner had attained to his particular stature by writing only his theoretical works Opera and Drama, Art and Revolution, and The Artwork of the Future — and no other opera than Rienzi!
Artaud presents himself to us, then, as an aesthetic paradox — a problem. And it is as a problem that we will have to explore him to untangle his significance.
II
Richard Wagner loved the body — or certainly he loved what the body could do. Hydrotherapy was a passion with him for a season; so were silk dressing gowns and mountain hikes. Tristan und Isolde (1859) speaks of spiritual love, but we need listen to only a scene of it to realize this is a limpid celebration of total erotic corporeality and a dramatic exploration of its effects on body, mind, and spirit. And amidst the various scenic miscalculations, didn’t that sensuous, incestuous collapse to which Patrice Chereau treated the world at the end of his Walküre, Act I, over PBS in 1983, seem, somehow, right?