Antonin Artaud by David A. Shafer (review)

In this biography of Antonin Artaud, the historian David Shafer provides a highly readable account of Artaud’s life and times, presented in a series of short chapters: his bourgeois upbringing in Marseille; his move to Paris in his early twenties, where his involvement with André Breton and the Surrealist group was intense, until he could no longer stomach their collective ethos; his film career and his work in the theatre, including his founding of the company ‘Le Théâtre Alfred Jarry’ and his development of the concept of a theatre of ‘cruelty’ that could effect sensorial change in the audience; and his travels to find the ancient pagan cultures of Mexico and Ireland, which were, for him, the source of the myth, magic, and ritual he believed theatre to have lost. The final section of the book considers Artaud’s incarceration in three asylums in the later part of his life, where he was subjected to the new ‘convulsive’ and ‘electro-shock’ therapies. A series of black-and-white photographs provide a disturbing illustration of the physical deterioration that occurred in the course of his relatively short life. Shafer is compelling on the richness of the avant-gardes in Paris in the 1920s, showing the radicalizing influence of theatre-makers such as Firmin Gémier, Jacques Copeau, and Charles Dullin on Artaud’s conception of the theatre, and what it could do. The section on Artaud’s theatre and film work in Paris in the period from 1924 to 1935 illustrates the range of his practice: as an actor on both stage and screen, as a writer, and as a director of plays. What comes through vividly here is how very active and hard-working Artaud was, and how much he achieved in terms of publication and performance in his lifetime. Shafer’s critical view of Artaud’s life is underpinned by excellent research that combines familiarity with much of the recent scholarship and the panoramic perspective of the social historian. The book’s range is extended further by accounts of Artaud from those who knew him or worked with him, such as the actor Jean-Louis Barrault or the writer Anaı¨s Nin. Indeed, the study shows that Artaud had a talent for friendship, and it was a committee formed by his friends that raised the money to keep him in a nursing home at Ivry-sur-Seine at the end of his life. He wrote a number of important poetic works during this time, culminating with ‘Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société’ (1947), a ‘meditation on the tension between the rational (medicine) and the irrational (art)’ (p. 190); it was awarded the Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1948, just a month before his death. Although Artaud acquired the status of icon of ‘hipness’ within artistic communities from the 1960s onwards, Shafer concludes by wondering how he might have felt about his name being used as a badge of outré credentials. Happily, this book contributes a persuasive ‘critical life’ to the growing scholarship, one that shows Artaud to have been a hard-working and admired avant-garde artist, whose creative achievement was an inspiration to many in the artistic community in Paris in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.