Who am I?
Where do I come from?
I am Antonin Artaud
and if I say it
as I know how to say it
immediately
you will see my present body
fly into pieces
and under ten thousand
notorious aspects
a new body
will be assembled
in which you will never again
be able
to forget me.
(Post-Scriptum), translated by Clayton Eshleman and Norman Glass.
French writer and
actor.
Born
September 4, 1896, in
Marseilles.
He moved to
Paris in
1920, where he became an actor. He did, in fact, cut a striking figure.
He was a minor figure in the
surrealist movement until 1927, when he helped start the Théâtre
Alfred Jarry, which would go in other directions.
In 1935 he there put on his play,
The Cenci, which was his first example of the
Theater of Cruelty.
Artaud had a lifelong problem with
mental illness. He spent most of
1936 in
Mexico, where he used
peyote. This certainly did not help matters. In
Ireland in
1937 on a boat, he is
straightjacketed after threatening to hurt himself, and is sent back to
France. For about 9 years from that point, he stays in various hospitals and mental institutions, in
Rouen,
Paris, and, primarily,
Rodez. There, he was made victim to
medical ignorance, and was given
electroshock therapy and a variety of other "treatments".
January 13, 1947 he delivered a lecture at the
Theatre du Vieux Colombier.
Died
March 4, 1948, at the
Hospice d'Ivry in Paris. His final work was
To Have Done With The Judgment Of God.
Insanity often produces great
genius in
art. Then again, it sometimes produces works which are simply
bizarre and
disturbing. To some of us, that alone is a form of genius.
Artaud was quite prolific, and wrote
prose as well as
poetry- some of it more coherant than the rest. It is interesting to read him to find out what happens when you mix insanity with the
avant garde.
Susan Sontag and
Jacques Derrida have had interesting things to say about Artaud, but then again,
Harold Bloom lists him as a
Canonical author for the
Chaotic Age, so he's not as
pomo and
trendy as you would think.
Let's have a look at the folowing
Jack Hirshman translation of one piece which was published by one of Artuad's doctors, Dr.
Gaston Ferdière, in the December
1959 La Tour de Feu. About the piece, the doctor writes "I add here a specific example of Artaud's mental derangement, the dedication to the
Führer of
The New Revelations of Being... One recognizes here the faulty memory (so frequent with Artaud along with mistaken identity),
mystical ideas,
glossolalia, etc...." I too add it here as a specific example of Artaud's mental
derangment.
TO
ADOLPH HITLER
in memory of the
Romanische cafe in
Berlin one afternoon in
May of '32,
and because I pray
God
give you the
grace to remember
all the wonders by which HE (sic)
has GRATIFIED (RESUSCITATED)
YOUR HEART
this very day
Kudar dayro Zarish Ankkara
Thabi
(December 3, 1943)