A. Antonin Artaud by David Shafer (review)

Reviews 271 Shafer, David A. Antonin Artaud. Glasgow: Reaktion, 2016. ISBN 978-1-78023-5707 . Pp. 247. This is a broad-ranging, refreshingly readable study. Shafer cogently explores the life—while usefully relating it to the major works—of Antonin Artaud (1896–1949), poet, actor, playwright, surrealist, drug addict, eventual asylum inmate, and one of twentieth-century France’s most “mythological,” “palimpsestic” cultural figures (7). Although Artaud’s writings and“quixotic” (174) ideas might“scream” alienation and rebellion, when his major works are stripped of their symbolism and verbiage, they reveal a certain “logic.” Their real revolution is over “the cultural space of meanings, understandings, representations and signs” (8). But the brief titles of each of Shafer’s eight chapters (“Youth,” “Paris,” “Beyond,” “Performance,” “Cruelty,” “Voyage,” “262 602”—the case number assigned toArtaud by a psychiatric hospital—and“Restoration”) belie the complexity inherent in Artaud’s“head-spinningly confusing”choice of artistic expression as a means to rebel against bourgeois values and Western cultural norms, to subvert nature, and to transcend conventional communication (7). The Théâtre Alfred Jarry, for example, which Artaud opened with the surrealist Roger Vitrac in 1926, promised a “complete psychic transformation of mind, body, and senses for its audiences”(67), privileging a“spiritual, consciousness-raising experience,”much like the Balinese theater, which Artaud preferred to the “puerile entertainment of no enduring consequence” that he saw Western theater to be (110). Similarly, the fortyminute radiophonic performance Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, a “cautionary tale of American industrial capitalism [...] militarism and nature’s subversion” (200), which Artaud created some twenty years later, was—beneath its drums, gongs,screams, and screeches—a cry for help,“the desperate [warning] of a man out of time” (203). As Shafer admonishes in his reflective epilogue focusing on the “posterity” of the paradoxical and continuingly enigmatic Artaud, it is easy to see how the oeuvre of such a complex creator, hailed both as a “madman” and a “visionary” (218), has often been misunderstood, misappropriated, if not trivialized, whether by cultural theorists, visual artists, punk musicians, or any others who might have sought inclusion in a particular canon or have wanted to establish“outré”credentials (210). Readers seeking better to comprehend how Artaud has come to be so much more to so many than he ultimately was, or might have been, would be well advised to take Shafer at his word but perhaps not to judge his own book by its cover. For with many more than the “34 illustrations” touted on the back cover—some thirty-seven different photos: thirty featuring Artaud alive, one of his death mask; nine sketches or drawings, which he saw to be an extension of his revolt against perceptions “preordained and preconditioned by hegemonic forces” (168), including two self-portraits by Artaud—it contains much more than meets the eye and is truly revelatory. California Polytechnic State University Brian G. Kennelly ...