-
Introduction : The Uses and Abuses of Antonin Artaud
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
introduction : The Uses and Abuses of Antonin Artaud Je n’ai jamais rien trouvé d’éclairant dans ce que les gens disaient sur Artaud. —paule thévenin An apocalyptic sensibility drives the writing of Antonin Artaud, infuriated and propelled by a sense of the world’s utter and unimaginable wrongness. Artaud’s works, expressing exhilaration in brutality and seeking peace in annihilation, describe a universe in which evil rules without its dialectical term of good, and in which the best existence would be one without body, shape, or consciousness. The fight for impossible absolutes—the staging of a hopeless and devastating struggle—is what Artaud called the Theater of Cruelty, and it is for imagining this that he has become one of the most renowned theatrical figures of the twentieth century. Artaud envisioned the Theater of Cruelty as this: an epidemic event that would destroy the individual and overturn every human creation, including language and civilization; liberate itself from all logic, matter, and history; “assault and benumb” the individual; operate in the realm of myth and image; and impose the vision of an omnipotent director on a “hypnotized” and surrounded assembly. His vision was rooted in a strong belief in the dark nature of man, the omnipresence of evil, the foulness of the body, and the need to systematically employ “cruelty and terror.”1 Artaud sounded this call in The Theater and Its Double, which was written between 1931 and 1935, a period when Europe was still shattered from the devastation of World War I; people were being politically conceptualized as masses; and charismatic leaders denouncing the world’s corruption were orchestrating their way into World War II through spectacular manifestations of sensorial, rhetorical, and emotional manipulation. Seen in this light, the traditional reception and interpretation of Artaud ’s work appear inadequate, if not indeed inappropriate, in several ways. For almost half a century, The Theater and Its Double has been shadowed by a peculiarly persistent set of doubles of its own: those of 1960s radicals in the United States, England, and France. The era’s experimental theater artists, cultural revolutionaries, and progressive thinkers established the dominant tenor of subsequent interpretations. Most of us encountered Artaud by way of the ’60s; that is to say, through the concerns of critics, editors, and interpreters such as Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, the Tel Quel group, and Paule Thévenin, and artists such as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and the Living Theatre. In the ’60s, Artaud’s works were embedded in a context that we can broadly call leftist: one characterized by a striving, through the advancement of human awareness and creativity , to create a new social and political world in which a greater number of people could enjoy a greater amount of individual liberty and happiness. While The Theater and Its Double had an undeniable impact on the 1960s and seemed to anticipate many of that generation’s preoccupations, our interpretations of the work have been curtailed by reading it as if it had sprung from that period itself, ignoring its actual—and disconcerting —historical context: the interwar era in Western Europe. The task of Artaud and His Doubles is to firmly situate Artaud’s theatrical writings and practice (almost entirely produced in the 1920s and ’30s) in the political, intellectual, and theatrical climate of its time. Such a contextualization dramatically alters our associations with his works and his thought. Through historical examinations and close readings of his works, we uncover a set of previously undiscussed doubles in France, Italy, and Germany who were voicing a very different set of values and concerns from those of the 1960s interpreters with which we are so familiar. These new doubles are the reactionary post- and pre-war Europeans who eventually channeled their frustrated, cataclysmic sensibility into tirades against reason , glorifications of unthinking homogenized masses, and calls for widescale destruction in the name of a higher truth. Artaud posited that the double of theater was life; that the theater came first, and it had the ability to create a new reality. It is worth, then, closely examining his ideas for the theater in light of the life around him and what soon followed. Artaud entered the public eye in 1923 with a series of letters denouncing the inadequacy of language, and he exited the world in 1948 doing the same, leaving, in addition to a substantial body of performance and visual art, approximately ten thousand pages of this inadequacy be2 : artaud and his doubles [18...