The ideas of Antonin Artaud have infected and transformed the modern theatre. His tract The Theatre and Its Double stands alongside the writings of Stanislavsky and Brecht as a canonical work of 20th-century theatrical theory. But during his brief and unhappy life, Artaud was denounced by his Surrealist cohorts, roundly dismissed as a lunatic, and starved and tortured in French asylums. Stephen Barber’s Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs offers an authoritative examination of the life of this cultural legend, attempting to synthesize Artaud’s disordered theories while rendering a credible portrait of the man behind them. The result is a sad and searing tale of a man whose Theatre of Cruelty bore the scars of his life of cruelty: of madness and addiction, of suppression and ridicule, and of penury and pain.
By the time he was 22 years old, Artaud had already spent five years in a sanatorium due to depression. He later moved to Paris under the care of Dr. Toulouse (a specialist in “artistic genius”), where he soon developed what would become a lifelong addiction to opium. He became a card-carrying Surrealist in the fall of 1924, collaborating with Andre Breton and spearheading the Surrealist Research Centre in 1925. Due to his striking physiognomy he was also a successful film actor, playing Marat in Abel Gance’s Napoleon as well as leading roles in 22 other films. He supplemented his acting career by writing oddly fragmented poetry (although he rejected literature in his 1926 manifesto “All Writing Is Pigshit”) fomenting the aesthetic groundwork for his Theatre of Cruelty. Never one for esprit de corps, Artaud denounced the Surrealistic movement in 1927. The feeling seems to have been mutual especially after his official expulsion by Breton at the Cafe Prophet and Artaud’s quasi-Surrealist Alfred Jarry Theatre closed its doors in 1930.
It was in 1931 that Artaud witnessed a performance of Balinese dance, igniting a storm of theoretical writing that would eventually become The Theatre and Its Double. He envisioned a Theatre of Cruelty that combined Surrealistic incursions into the unconscious with a painstaking directorial ordering of these unleashed elements. These staged spectacles (Barber calls them “gestural events”) could not be repeated because “every spoken word is dead, and is crucial only at the moment in which it is spoken.” Artaud wrote:
[W]e will not stage any written play. The spectacles will be created directly on the stage, with all the means that the stage offers, but with those means taken as a language with the same status as the dialogue of written theatre, or words …. Having become aware of this language in space language of sounds, of cries, of lights, of onomatopoeia the theatre owes it to itself to organize this language, by making people and objects become true hieroglyphs….
Blows and Bombs draws no equation between the psychic anguish of Theatre of Cruelty and the pain of Artaud’s own drug detoxification, but the connection seems unavoidable. Still, it is to Barber’s credit that he allows Artaud’s theories to stand on their own, without diagnosing Artaud as either a delusional addict or a ranting schizophrenic.
Sorting out Artaudian theory is a daunting task, but Barber correctly grounds Artaud’s radical thought in his ideas on the body. Artaud viewed the body as in a process of constant transmogrification–a “grinding metamorphosis” and equated stasis and formation with sickness. So, too, his theory is always dynamic but ungraspable, inchoate: Artaud’s unformed ideas slip through your fingers as you read them. Barber emphasizes that, in Artaud’s theatre, “body comes before the word, before the world,” and it is not surprising that Derrida and other post-structuralists are smitten with Artaud’s nontextual ideas about theatrical representation.
But Artaud’s theories were as remote as the man himself. He had few friends and fewer lovers, although Breton remained a supporter up to Artaud’s death in 1948. Anais Nin described Artaud as a “drugged, contracted being who always walks alone. His eyes are blue with languor, black with pain. He is all nerves.” An itinerant loner (Artaud: “I do not believe in associations”), he traveled to Mexico and participated in peyote-induced rituals, convinced that the Indians embodied a pure and apocalyptic culture of Cruelty. He ended up in Ireland where he became unusually attached to a “magical” cane (with a metal tip, so it shot out sparks behind him on the sidewalk), which he carried to ward off demons. Eventually delirious, Artaud was strait-jacketed and incarcerated in Paris, where he was subjected to periodic starvation and electroshock therapy for eight years.
Barber might have compared Artaudian thought to other theories of performance and representation, thereby locating Artaud both historically and critically and giving a broader perspective on his legacy. Still, Blows and Bombs is a much-needed comprehensive introduction to Artaud’s life and work. The last chapter documenting Artaud’s most productive period of drawings, recordings and writings is an especially cogent blend of analysis with compassionate narrative of Artaud’s final days.
But it was not the tangible and earthbound relics that ultimately concerned Artaud, and so it goes with what he left behind. Barber writes that “the testing of Artaud’s existence … became his creation,” and the life of the artist is perhaps the proper focus of what constitutes the Artaudian oeuvre. In “No More Masterpieces,” Artaud wrote: “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre is first of all made to teach us that.” Blows and Bombs compels us to bear witness: to the life of a tormented visionary and, by extension, to the blood and guts of the theatre itself.
