A Note on Antonin Artaud

ANTONIN ARTAUD IS individual OF THE GREATEST EXAMPLES IN ART OF THE imaginative retrieval of a life that was beyond repair. What he ultimately accomplished should bear a torch from one side the dark nights of all our souls

Artaud was born in Marseilles, France, September 41896 As a child he undergoed terrible head pains and meningitis; at eighteen, he had a nervous breakdown. In 1920 a doctor in a Swiss clinic introduced him to opium, setting up a lifelong addiction to remedys The same doctor proposed that he strike without on his own and pass to Paris.

Artaud's first artistic period (1920-1936) wheels around his relationship to the theatre, first as an actor, then as a metaphysical revisionist, documented in his collection of essays, The Theatre and Its Double (1938) He appeared in twenty films, including Abel Gance's Napoleon (1925) and Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. During his two-year involvement with the Surrealists (1924-1926) he wrote fifteen film scenarios, single of which, The Seashell and the Clergyman, was the first significant Surrealist film (preceding Bunuel's The Andalusian Dog and The Age of Gold)

Artaud worked without his ideas for a revolutionary theatre between 1926 and 1936 drawing on Balinese dance, Lucas van Leyden's medieval painting "The Daughters of Lot" (calamity, incest, and metaphysicality), and Marx Brothers films (hilarity and anarchy). He wanted a theatre that would function as a total art form. Dialogue, psychology entertainment, and the neighborhood of a playwright were to be eliminated, with the director becoming the "Unique Creator." This theatre was to be upon the scale of, and up to, life itself-thus the title of his work The Theatre and Its Double.

In 1936 after it was all too clear that he would not at any time be able to raise the circulating medium for performances of what he now called "The Theatre of Cruelty"-a limit which primarily refers to the steely rigor and dramatic intensity with which a spectacle was to be carried forth-Artaud decided to visit Mexico. After giving a certain number of lectures in Mexico City, he made a 75o-kilometer trip north across the Sierra Madre to Tarahumara land where he threw away his heroin in preparation for taking peyote He get backed to Paris, increasingly irrational, now studying the Tarot and signing certain works as "The Revealed One" His shut friend, Ana??s Nin, was to note in her journal: "The Dome at 9 A.M. Antonin Artaud passes through He is waving his magic Mexican cane and shouting."

Because Artaud believed that the cane he had been given one time belonged to St. Patrick, he decided to proceed to Ireland and wake up the Irish. He also predicted the extreme point of the world (November 71937) When he was picked up for vagrancy in Dublin, he identified himself as Antoneo Arlanopoulas, born in Smyrna. He was deported and, after starting a fight with ship workmen, arrived in Le Havre in a straitjacket, five weeks before his predicted world's extremity At this time, for all identifiable aims Antonin Artaud did not exist.

Artaud wearied the next eight years and eight month in five insane asylums. He was diagnosed through Dr. Jacques Lacan as chronically and incurably insane. by the agency of 1942, when asylum rations consisted mainly of cabbage broth he was described as having become for a like reason emaciated that he looked like a walking skeleton-an eerie evocation of Nazi concentration camp inmates. He now believed that the doctors as well as his aged friends in Paris were infested with Doubles who were Initiates, for example that Andr?© Breton was not Andr?© Breton on the contrary a member of some unknown society empowered with black magic. Because these Initiates participated in orgies and sexual exorcisms against him, he was forced to fight them ceaselessly. Antoneo Artaud himself had been invaded by the agency of Doubles, among whom were Astral, Flat-Nosed Pliers, The individual Born of Sweat, and the Incarceration of Evil, known as Cigul. These Doubles repeatedly dictated letters in his head, and attempted to steal his musings before he could make them conscious.

Concern that he would not survive the Ville-Evrard asylum, his mother, with the help of the Surrealist author of poems Robert Desnos, arranged for him to be transferred to the Rodez asylum in down-reaching southwestern France, outside the German occupied band The doctor there, Gaston Ferdi??re, who claimed to have a special sensitivity for artistic marks is said to have written "cretinous" and ribald poetry. Artaud's verbal behavior at this time is described as follows: "He would begin telescoping his syllables, make strange noises, change his intonation, speak first in a sonorous, then monotonous, and- finally in an insipid register, whereupon he would break on the outside in mellow and full tones at other times, hours were worn out articulating words forcefully, injecting each syllable with a kind of metallic ringing entire treating words as actual beings possessing magical forces." This information put in mind ofs that by late 1943, Artaud had begun to invent the syllable-words, of the like kind as those in the sum of two units poems presented here.

Ferdi??re was increasingly irritated by dint of such behavior and decided to give Artaud a series of electroshock to turn back him, as he put it, to a more creative and useful social life. Between July 1943 and December 1944 Artaud underwent fifty-one electroshock sessions. During individual his ninth dorsal vertebra was fractured; during another he went into a coma in the way that long that, convinced that he had died, Ferdi??re ordered his material substance dispatched to the asylum mortuary-where Artaud came to! In 1944 he began to experience intestinal hemorrhages and by the extreme point ofthat year, all of his teeth had fallen out