Abstract
Artaud is difficult to grasp. The import of his theoretical statements is best appreciated in Peter Brook’s formula: ‘Artaud applied is Artaud betrayed’ (p. 213). His writing takes forms that sometimes make little distinction between documentary records and mythologizing fancy. The testimony of artists and intellectuals who attended his anguished public performances suggests it was like watching a man flaying himself alive. The publication of his complete works was held up for many years after his death by disputes between his family and the publisher Gallimard. Factors like these have meant that the impact of Artaud has tended to be diffuse, mediated in indirect and often remote ways. It has only recently become possible to access verifiable versions of his output, illuminated by correspondence with key figures of the era.
David A. Shafer has produced a critical biography that sticks to ascertainable facts while leaving space for judicious appraisals of more speculative ‘a posteriori conflations of the real and the imaginary’ (p. 13). Despite some over-writing and occasional mistranslation of original sources he has produced a scholarly and readable study. In nine chapters he charts the life and offers exegetical discussions of key texts. Of Artaud’s youth we learn that his character – and characteristically fluid elaborations on identity – were marked by his maternal grandmother’s roots in Smyrna, where as a child he spent his holidays, learning modern Greek and absorbing the city’s eclectic mix of Eastern and Western cultures. Intermarriages within a close-knit family – his paternal and maternal grandmothers were sisters – can be seen to have borne long-term traces in the theme of incest in his adaptation of Les Cenci. His experience of family inspired a hatred of patriarchy, the ‘absence of fraternity between fathers and sons’ becoming, in Artaud’s eyes, ‘the model of all the social relationships based on authority’ (p. 20). By the age of 17 he was showing the first signs of the psychological distress and depression to which he would be condemned throughout his life. A (perhaps erroneous) diagnosis of syphilis was the origin of a lifelong marked distaste for sex and an incapacity to forge ‘lasting romantic relationships’ (p. 144), and his first experience of morphine and laudanum in a clinic in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, inaugurated his tormented relationship with drugs that also endured through to his death in 1948.
Arriving in Paris in 1920 Artaud came under the influence of the psychiatrist Édouard Toulouse, who theorized the relationship between creative genius and neuropathy. Artaud published texts in Toulouse’s review Demain – notably a devastating critique of the department store: ‘Le Grand Magasin empoisonneur’, prefiguring Artaud’s subsequent excoriations of commodified culture. A strand of anarchism and hatred of the bourgeois regime developed in this context lay behind Artaud’s attraction to experimental theatre, first with Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre and, more influentially, in work he did with Charles Dullin and the Théâtre de l’Atelier which led eventually to his encounter with Cambodian and Vietnamese dance companies at the Colonial Exhibition of 1922 and later his momentous writings on Japanese Noh and Balinese dance theatre. He fell in love with one of Dullin’s actresses, Romanian-born Génica Athanasiou. The affair lasted barely five years but Artaud’s letters to her are an invaluable source, which Shafer uses to great effect, enabling a better understanding of the man’s mentality as well as his intellectual concerns – with language, identity, theatre and drugs.
Shafer charts the evolution of Artaud’s links with intellectual beacons of the age: from Jacques Rivière, Jean Paulhan and the Nouvelle Revue Française to André Breton and the Surrealist movement which for a while seemed to provide ‘a family and home’ (p. 58) for Artaud’s idiosyncratic vision and his darker impulses. The Théâtre Alfred Jarry, launched in 1926, consummated his break with la Révolution surréaliste, though it in turn gave way to a temporary fascination for cinema and work with Abel Gance, for whom he performed as Marat, a role which though relatively small was to become iconic.
The 1930s saw ‘a rush of creative energy and produced some of the most notable and memorable works of his career’ (p. 112). He conceptualized the Theatre of Cruelty (its initial label, astonishingly, was to have been Theatre of the NRF), whose manifestos Shafer glosses most elegantly; and wrote Les Cenci, which brought him into collaboration with Roger Blin and Jean-Louis Barrault. During eight subsequent years of incarceration in asylums he endured a variety of treatments including the brutal electro-convulsive shock therapy. Shafer devotes sympathetic attention to his writings from this period, ‘ideas morphing into a jumbled mess’ (p. 146), the better to explain the triumphs of his latter years, the ‘Restoration’ that saw him resort to drawing and express himself notably through radio with ‘Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu’. An epilogue traces Artaud’s posterity through cultural theorists to contemporary theatre and beyond.