Articulating Artaud

Even the most arcane esoteric abstract aesthetic theorist of the 20th century turns out to have a pop culture angle. A few in fact.

The first is that long before his theatrical scribblings reached the world Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a movie actor (do you doubt it? Look at that photo!). He appeared in films by Carl Dreyer, GW Pabst, Fritz Lang, Maurice Tourneur,Abel Gance at al between 1923 and 1935. He had major roles in such films as Gance’s Napleonand Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Readers of this blog will also appreciate the fact that his influential 1958 book The Theatre and Its Double includes an essay on the Marx Brothers, in particular the movies Animal Crackers and Monkey Business. I’m not convinced that he knew precisely what he was looking at, but his commentary does have at least one virtue: no one else on earth has ever looked at the Marx Brothers through the same lens as Antonin Artaud.

The same book, in its 1958 Grove Press edition, had a huge impact on the aesthetics of the original off-off-Broadway movement. It would not be too strong to claim that the book spawned off-off Broadway in the first place, through its influence on the post-war Absurdist playwrights, the gang at Caffe Cino and La Mama, the Living Theatre, and so forth. Artaud inspired Ginsberg’sHowl. The experimental theatre and film and poetry of the time influenced rock groups like The Doors and The Velvet Underground. Andre Gregory certainly drops his name in My Dinner with Andre,to raise Wallace Shawn’s bemused eyebrows. Thus, if you’ve never read Artaud, you felt his waves, or at least his ripples.

To actually read Artaud, however, is to let loose a gasoline fire across your mind. The vast majority of those who have read his works have done so as theatre students. Some, no doubt, have little patience for him, for he is manifestly not a creature of the material or the concrete. He deals in what might be described as outrageous, mysterious declarations. Much of what he claims sort of beggar one’s belief. He coined the phrase (in the act of advocating for it) “Theatre of Cruelty”. He compares theatre to the Bubonic Plague. Its “double”, referred to in the title, is reality, I guess? But because he is speaking at such a metaphysical level, what reality consists of is up for grabs. The Hindus, for example, consider the material world to be a veil of illusion called Maya. What is the reality of consciousness or existence? Artaud is more like a poet or a prophet, who communicates through metaphor and emotion. As all such prophets, his pronouncements are subject to interpretation. There is no single definitive meaning to take away, which can be a hard thing for a lot of people to accept. It’s a mistake to try to understand what he’s trying to get at, to claim that you “got” it. As with most world religions, those who claim to have it are the ones you should disbelieve the most.

That said, Artaud did articulate some concrete ideas outright. He was very much interested in masks and movement, Balinese theatre, and the ancient Olmecs of Mexico. He clearly has a desire to reclaim fundamentals, to clear away all the claptrap of the past few centuries that seem to add up to little beyond superficiality and impediment to understanding. He goes to the primitive in a search for something genuine. He values ritual, but only the truly powerful sort that is deeply felt, not a mere empty “going through the motions.” He distrusts words, which are by definition lies (being mere symbols or stand-ins for phenomena, often replacing rather than representing reality). He privileges the irrational, and seems to have a lot in common with Nietzsche in his frenzy to burn all dogma to the ground. And yet there is something there for practical actors to latch on to, for, no less than Stanislavski (theoretically his opposite number) the goal is to break through convention to a place of truth and honesty.

Need we add that he was seriously mentally ill? His entire life he was spent in and out of institutions, frequently medicated (or self-medicating). Further, his parents were first cousins. Born and raised in Marseilles, he was ethnically 3/4 Greek. His identity is central to who he was I feel. The Greeks having given birth to western theatre, Marseilles having been founded as a Greek colony, and the French revering Greek culture as they always have. Artaud was extraordinarily well read, with all the diminishment of human interaction that goes along with that. He read Poe and the Symbolists, and then became involved in Paris theatre, learning at the feet of men like André Antoineand Jacques Copeau. He named his first theatre after Alfred Jarry, and was for a time closely associated with the Surrealists, although they parted ways as the movement started to become more about political ideology than the realm of the imagination. Artaud could best be described as “religious” or quasi-religious in outlook. He had his eyes on the cosmos; deciding which sort of martinet or bureaucrat led people in their meaningless lives of drudgery held no interest for him.

This is a story that wants to have a spectacular finish right? But, no, Artaud did not set himself on fire, or jump from a cathedral tower or die murdered in his bathtub like Marat (his most famous role). Rife with cancer, his lifeless body (probably full of drugs) was discovered sitting on the floor of his room with one boot in his hand. But in its own way, as an image, that too, sounds like a piece of beautiful and terrifying theatre.