In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction to Watchfiends & Rack Screams Antonin Artaud is one of the greatest examplesin art of imaginative retrieval of a life that was beyond repair. What he ultimately accomplished should bear a torch through the dark nights of all of our souls. Given the new perspectives on his writing and drawing that he created in what may now be considered his second major period—from his regeneration in the Rodez asylum in 1945 to his death outside of Paris in 1948—it seems especially pertinent to introduce a new translation of key works from this period with an essay that attempts to compactly yet fully detail the wayhis life and work intertwine and reverberate. Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud,calledAntonin (or "little Antoine," to distinguish him from his father), was born on September 4, 1896, in Marseilles , France. His father, aship chandler, and mother, aLevantine Greek who married her cousin, had nine children, only three ofwhom survived. Such an excessivemortality rate may have been in part due to congenital problems, which alsoplayed arole in Artaud's successive illnesses. At four years old, he suffered terrible head pains from the onset of meningitis, one side effect of which led him to see double. In desperation (there was then no cure for acute meningitis), his father found and used upon the child a machine that produced static electricity, transmitted by wires attached to the person's head (prefiguring the electroshock treatments Artaud would receive in the Rodez asylum many years later). Whatever the alleged home cure's worth, he recovered, although he remained nervous and irritable throughout his youth. This introduction appeared in Antonin Artaud's Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman, with Bernard Bador, Exact Change, Boston, 1995. 162 C O M P A N I O N S P I D E R Between the ages of six and eight, he stuttered and experienced contractions of his facial nerves and tongue. "All this," he wrote in 1932, was "complicated by corresponding psychic troubles which did not appear dramatically until about the age of nineteen."1 Antonin was also deeply affected by the death of his seven-monthold sister, Germaine, when he was nine. Because the baby would not obey the commands of her nanny to stop crawling away from her, the nanny slammed Germaine down on her lap with such force that she perforated the baby's intestine, causing an internal hemorrhage from which she died the following day. Germaine haunted Artaud to the extent that much later he would induct her into his set of "daughters of the heart, to be born." Such "daughters," basedon family members and friends, represented a repudiation of his own birth and a seeing of himself as the sole progenitor of a new family "tree." In 1914, right before graduating from high school, Artaud had a nervous breakdown, destroyed his earlier poems, and gave awayhis library to friends. Extremely agitated, he prayed constantly and determined to become a priest (a religious crisis that would manifestitself again, with greater force, at Rodez). At this point, the family arranged various rest cures that, with the exception of a few breaks (one in which Artaudwas briefly inducted into the army), continued for the next five years (again suggesting another early life/later life parallel: during the first World War, Artaud spent most of his time in clinics and thermal spas;for allof the second World War, he wasincarcerated in five asylums). In the year after his 1914 breakdown, Artaud later claimed he had been stabbed in the back by a pimp while walkingdown the street. The alleged assassintold him, he recounted, that it wasnot hewho had perpetrated the attack; rather, at that moment, he had been possessed. In setting forth the first of some alleged half dozen attacks on his life, Artaud was beginning the elaboration of a systematic "attack syndrome," composed of fact and probably fiction, in which evil forces were to ceaselessly obstruct his attempts to fulfill his destiny. During 1917, suffering acute head pains and stormy, incomprehensible moods, Artaud, reading Baudelaire,Rimbaud, and especially Poe, was moved from clinic to clinic, at considerable expense to the family. He ended up, at the end of 1917, in a Swiss clinic, near Neuchatel, under the care of Dr. Dardel, who, besides encouraging him to draw and write, also prescribed opium, setting up his lifelong addiction to drugs (and againprefiguringa later parallel:his ambivalentrelationship [18.219.95.244] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

Share