Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud (September 4, 1896–March 4, 1948) was a playwright, actor, director, poet and artist.

Biographical Information

Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud was born in Marseille on September 4th, 1896. He died in Paris in 1948. Antonin is a diminutive form of Antoine (little Anthony), and was among a long list of names which Artaud went by throughout his life. Artaud's parents were partly Levantine-Greek, and he was much affected by this background.^* Although his mother had many children, only Antoine, his brother and his sister survived infancy. At the age of four, Antonin had a severe attack of meningitis. The virus gave Antonin a nervous, irritable temperament throughout adolescence. He also suffered from neuralgia, stammering and severe bouts of depression. As a teenager, he was stabbed in the back by a pimp for apparently no reason, which was similar to the experience of his fellow surrealist playwright Samuel Beckett. Artaud's parents arranged a long series of sanatorium stays for their disruptive son, which were both prolonged and expensive. They lasted five years, with a break of two months, June and July 1916, when Artaud was conscripted into the army. He was discharged due to his self-induced habit of sleepwalking. During Artaud's "rest cures" at the sanatorium he read Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Poe. In May 1919 the director of the sanatorium, Dr. Dardel, prescribed opium for Artaud, precipitating a lifelong addiction to that and other drugs. In March 1920 Artaud moved to Paris. At the age of 27, Artaud sent some of his surrealist poems to a Parisian magazine; they were rejected, but the editor wrote back seeking to understand him, and a relationship in letters was born; the poems and letters are Artaud's first published work, and gave him an opportunity to expound and clarify his emerging theories of reality and the theatre. In November 1926 Artaud was expelled from the surrealist movement and also wrote his manifesto titled Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre.

Artaud cultivated a great interest in cinema as well, writing the scenario for the first Surrealist film, The Seashell and the Clergyman, directed by Germaine Dulac. He also worked as an working in Abel Gance's Napoleon in the role of Jean Paul Marat and Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc as the monk Jean Massieu. Artaud's portrayal of Marat is a perfect example of melodrama in silent film. He used exaggerated movements to convey the fire of Marat's personality, a technique that he would employ later in the Theatre and its Double, as well as in his adaptation of The Cenci.

In 1926-28, Artaud ran the Alfred Jarry Theater along with Roger Vitrac. He produced and directed original works as well as pieces by Claudel and Strindberg. The Theater was extremely short-lived, but was attended by an enormous range of European artists, including Andre Gide, Arthur Adamov, and Paul Valery.

The 1930's saw the publication of The Theatre and Its Double, as well as the premiere of Artaud's production of his adaptation of Shelley's The Cenci. The Cenci was a commercial failure, although it employed innovative sound effects and had a set designed by Balthus. After the production failed, Artaud received a grant to travel to Mexico where he was a guest lecturer. He also studied the Tarahumara and experimented with the drug peyote, recording his experiences which were later released in a volume called "The Peyote Dance". The content of this work closely resembles the poems of his later days, concerned primarily with the supernatural. Some of the events portrayed in the book and movie Altered States seem to be based on this period of Artaud's studies; the protagonist visits a tribe of isolated Mexican Indians and participates in their sacred ritual involving local hallucinogens for the purpose of investigating the common religious experience. Artaud also recorded his horrific withdrawal from heroin upon entering the land of the Tarahumaras; having deserted his last supply of the drug at a mountainside, he literally had to be hoisted onto his horse, and soon resembled, in his words, "a giant, inflamed gum". Having beaten his addiction, however, Artaud would return to opiates later in life.

In 1937, Artaud returned to France where he obtained a walking stick of knotted wood that he believed belonged to St. Patrick, but also Lucifer and Jesus Christ. Artaud sought to return the staff to the Irish. It must be noted that he spoke very little English and he was unable to make himself understood. The majority of his trip was spent in a hotel room that he was unable to pay for. On the return trip from Ireland, Artaud believed he was being attacked by two crew members and retaliated; he was arrested and put in a straight-jacket.

The return from Ireland brought about the beginning of the final phase of Artaud's life, which was spent in different asylums. When France was occupied by the Nazis, friends of Artaud had him transferred to the Psychiatric hospital in Rodez, well inside Vichy territory, where he was put under the charge of Dr.Gaston Ferdière. Ferdière began administering electroshock treatments, to eliminate Artaud's symptoms, that included crafting spells and drawing disturbing images, as well as various delusions and odd physical tics. The treatments were ultimately not helpful. In 1946, Ferdière released Artaud to his friends who placed him in the psychiatric clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine.

Artaud was encouraged to write by his friends and interest in his work was rekindled. He recorded Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu, a production based on his poem "Artaud le Momo" for French Radio which was shelved due to the obscene subject matter of the text and general randomness of the cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements.

In January of 1948 Artaud was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. On March 4th, 1948 Artaud died, alone in his pavilion, seated at the foot of his bed, holding his shoe. It was suspected that he died from a lethal dose of the drug chloral, although whether or not he took it knowing it was a lethal dose is not known.

Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty

In his book Theatre and its Double, Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese Theatre. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly ritualized physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he called a "Theatre of Cruelty". By cruelty, he meant not sadism or causing pain, but rather a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality which, he said, lies like a shroud over our perceptions. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. He also believed that sexual activity, including masturbation, was harmful to the creative process and should be avoided if one hoped to achieve purity in one's art. This latter comment, however, can largely be attributed to his madness.

Antonin Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all expression is physical expression in space. Although he advocated a system of "social therapy" through theatre, Artaud was institutionalized for some time because he was considered insane.

"The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid."

– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley), Penguin, 1968, p.66

An outline of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty

Artaud had a pessimistic view of the world, but he believed that theatre could effect change.
Remove the audience from the everyday and use symbolic objects to work with the emotions and soul of the audience.
Attack the audience's senses through an array of technical methods and acting so that the audience would be brought out of their desensitization and have to confront themselves.
Use the grotesque, the ugly and pain in order to confront an audience, thereby being cruel to them.

Philosophical views

Imagination, to Artaud, is reality; dreams, thoughts and delusions are no less real than the 'outside' world. Reality appears to be a consensus, the same consensus the audience accepts when they enter a theatre to see a play and, for a time, pretend that what they are seeing is real.

His later work presents his rejection of the idea of the spirit as separate from the body. His poems glorify flesh and excretion, but sex was always a horror for him. Incest, cannibalism and deicide were instead normal urges, proved by the activities of tribal cultures untainted by civilised Western man. Civilisation was so pernicious that Europe was pulling once proud tribal nations like Mexico down with it into decadence and death, poisoning the innocence of the flesh with the evil of a God separate from it. The inevitable end result would be self-destruction and mental slavery, the two evils Artaud opposed in his own life at great cost (pain and imprisonment), as they could only be opposed personally and not on behalf of a collective or movement. He thus rejected politics and Marxism wholeheartedly, which led to his expulsion by the Surrealists who had begun to embrace it. Like Nietzsche and Buddha, Artaud saw suffering as essential to existence, and the price one must pay to become a complete human being. He thus rejected all utopias as inevitable dystopias. As noted, he had no cohesive philosophical system, as a prerequisite to being a true philosopher (seeker of knowledge).

Artaud's theories in Theatre and Its Double influenced rock musician Jim Morrison. Motley Crüe named the "Theater of Pain" album after reading his proposal for a Theater of Cruelty.

External links

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Biographical Information

Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty

An outline of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty

Philosophical views

External links