Artaud in Print

Book Reviews ARTAUD IN PRINT ARTAUD'S WRITING. "Toute l'ecriture est de la cochonnerie," writes Artaud in his 1925 pese.Nerjs. which Helen Weaver translates: "All writing is garbage." Ironically. much of Artaud's own writing had to be recycled from a virtual garbage heap. Although Artaud (1896-1948) himself agreed to the publication by Gallimard of his complete works, the first volume did not appear until 1956, eight years after his death. That volume contains Artaud's preface to the projected edition , reprints of four early books, and some two hundred pages of pieces written before 1930. No notes help the reader through this craggy path. Volumes II and III appeared in 1961, with minimal notes. By 1978, there were fourteen volumes in print, five of them in two editions (the second amplifying the first). Volume I was twice revised, the 1976 version being «un double tome" with long and informative notes. Artaud's Oeuvres completes will run to at least sixteen volumes, edited anonymously by Paule Thevenin. All Artaud readers are in her debt, but her adoring filiality toward him precludes scholarly objectivity. In addition to the incomplete Oeuvres completes, Gallimard in 1969 published Artaud's letters to his beloved Genica Athanasiou, and in 1977, under the title Nouveau ecrits de Rodez, his letters to psychiatrist Dr. Gaston Ferdiere (and to a few others). Earlier, lean-Louis Barrault published his friend's letters (Paris: Bordas, 1952), and recently, another friend, Anie Besnard, published hers (Paris: Nouveau Commerce, 1977; nouveau commerce indeed). Still more letters- Artaud's preferred genre - have appeared in various periodicals. Over thirty years after Artaud's death, all his prolific writings are not yet in print, much less .in b90ks. The Frenchless Artaud reader has access to only a fraction of this materiaL Aside from scattered translations in sometimes ephemeral publications (e.g., The Jet, Spurt, or Fountain of Blood), the most available volume is his celebrated Theater and its Double. The Mary Caroline Richards translation 409 410 BOOK REVIEWS (New York: Grove Press, 1958) claims to "faithfully follow the te"" of the 1938 GaJlimard edition. However, Richards omits phrases, shifts syntax, and occasionally renders a passage impenetrable (e.g., "If the theater has been created as an outlet for our repressions, the agonized poetry expressed in its bizarre corruptions of the facts of life demonstrates that life's intensity is still intact and asks only to be better directed"). American English is also the language of the several translators of jack Hirschman's Artaud anthology (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), with no excerpts from The Theater and its Double. Most recent and competent are Helen Weaver's translations in Susan Sontag's Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), arranged chronologically. Sontag's selections are judicious, except for a few serious omissions-Artaud's preface to the projected coJlected works, and, from the influential Theater and its Double, the Preface, "The Theater and Culture," and especially "The Theater and the Plague." To 585 pages of Helen Weaver's translations, Susan Sontag and Don Eric Levine append sixty-six pages of notes, often clearer than their French counterpart. The Theater and its Double has been rendered into English English by Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970), but he omits Artaud's Preface , "The Theatre and Alchemy," one letter on Cruelty, four letters on Language, and reviews of Animal Crackers and As I Lay Dying. Victor Corti and Alastair Hamilton are in the process of translating Artaud's complete works, but apparently from the first, meagerly noted Gallimard edition. Understandably, book-length criticism of Artaud-and my review will be largely restricted to books- lagged behind availability of texts. When one reads this criticism as I did, in a relatively short time, the books seem cut to the same mold: biography, defense against detractors, praise of a segment or aspect of the work, comments on a hodgepodge of predecessors and disciples. Since most readers will not gulp Artaud criticism as rapidly as I did, individual volumes may answer individual needs. Or may not. The books fall into convenient groups- psychological case histories (which I did not read), rhapsodies , biographies...