Artaud and His Doubles (review)
- Artaud and His Doubles
What makes Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty perennially fascinating? Is [End Page 161] it the sense of certainty that he offers while acknowledging that uncertainty lies all around? Is it that he couches fate in the language of freedom? Kimberly Jannarone answers yes to both questions. She argues in her enlightening and engaging book that "Artaud” was invented in the 1960s in widespread misreadings of The Theatre and Its Double. It is this passionate, apolitical seer of the ritual theatre to whom we still introduce our students today.
While focusing primarily on Artaud's 1938 collection of essays—Jannarone has read his published writings, recordings, drawings, and manuscripts comprehensively—she does not present a mere impression of Artaud but a more rigorous view. As an account of the artist amidst his collaborators and contemporaries, Artaud and His Doubles participates in the scholarly rethinking of the role theatre and performance have played in modernity. The contributors to James M. Harding and John Rouse's Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (2006), for example, surmount the largely European, urban historical avant garde, with its confrontationalist attitude of épater le bourgeois, by addressing local and national performance from the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as a transnational context of hybrid gestures. Theatre scholars are also returning to the historical avant garde to challenge the principles of confrontation outlined by Renato Poggioli, Matei Calinescu, and other literary and cultural historians of the 1960s and 1970s, whose accounts tended to ignore the role played by theatre, and its directors and designers, and focus instead on the more familiar ideas of artists who emerged from progressive traditions in European literature and art. As we now see, reactionary elements at work in the historical avant garde were tangled with the progressive in ways difficult to account for through literary analysis or a biographical or historical recitation of events. While making good use of close reading and cultural theory when needed, Jannarone's work contributes importantly to new approaches in theatre and performance history.
She also reads Artaud's French commentators attentively, from writers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who focused on the suffering of the Artaud-embedded-in-language, to the American artists and writers like Susan Sontag, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre. This latter group imbibed Mary Caroline Richards's 1958 translation of Artaud's book and helped to turn him into Artaud-our-contemporary, a figure of the progressive left.
Most illuminating is Jannarone's second section, in which she "uncover[s] a set of previously undiscussed doubles in France, Italy, and Germany” (2), reactionaries who reconceived reasoning audiences as anxious, restless crowds who could be marshaled for "wide-scale destruction in the name of higher truth” (2). In a key chapter on people's theatres, Jannarone provides a missing link in our understanding of Artaud's aversion to realism. The fascist embrace of people's theatres as spectacles for the masses was also a rejection of individualism and, by implication, citizen participation in democratic forms of government. Artaud's rejection of [End Page 162] realism follows similar lines. Jannarone distinguishes usefully between Artaud and people's-theatre directors such as Max Reinhardt, who emigrated to the United States when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Alternately, she notes, citing work by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Victoria de Grazia, that like Artaud Reinhardt viewed his own work as apolitical when, in fact, it was ripe for political plucking by the Nazis because it "encourag[ed] the dissolution of the self into the crowd” (98). Jannarone goes on to situate Artaud's vision of the director of the Theatre of Cruelty as one instance of the broader late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trend toward an autocratic "artist of the theatre” who synthesized production elements into a single, compelling vision. But Jannarone offers ways to appreciate Artaud as well. This chapter is most useful for teaching Artaud's plays from 1926...
