Musings on Antonin Artaud

DISCLAIMER: In this post (and in posts to follow) you will experience my feeble attempt to deposit my reflections regarding our discussions and readings during this seminar. I lay no claims to being correct, comprehensible, nor altogether sane. Know that I am simply trying to make it make sense for me. Bonne chance!

I'm reading a series of essays by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), most known for his theories on theater, but he was an actor and director as well.

Here's a site dedicated to him and his work in English:
http://www.antoninartaud.org/home.html

Basically, he breaks with the accepted theatrical traditions in which the productions try to offer a "slice of life" or a window on reality. For him, the true theater is one that emits a shadow (which is the true entity--the perfect self?). It does not attempt to reproduce reality, but rather, it is reality, and what we have come to know as reality are simply false images--fakes--! Okay, trying to explain this is making me think that I don't get it, but hey...this is Artaud for goodness sake!

He was unstable, used drugs, was fascist and was committed several times to mental institutions...but his work is genius--if you like the kind of stuff that's shocking and thought provoking...I don't think many of us can be neutral about him.

Here's my current reflection: Artists tend to create to express or reveal something that is inside of them that would otherwise lay hidden, unreflected, buried...artists are compelled to create with whatever talent they have to release that which torments them within--because I think the work of the best artists are truly agonizing for them. Their oeuvres are personal reflections--although they would enjoy it if they could also provoke (positively or negatively) and transform the public, it seems to be their own personal journey, their own ritual, which produces the art. For Artaud, his medium would be the theater.

What was Artaud's understanding of fear and it's role in self-transformation? He went to Mexico and experimented with peyote, the hallucinatory drug produced mainly in Mexico and used for rituals and spiritual quests. You can read more on Artaud and peyotl in French here: http://www.antoninartaud.org/peyotl.html.

A passage that I read from this article indicates that with peyotl or peyote, one will experience hallucinations which cause great fear or laughter, or uh, both...I remember laughing and crying when watching the movie "Scream" which is as far as I'll go in terms of horror movies. However, the article goes on to say that the drug "gave [the user] strength, removed fear, and prevented them from feeling the effects of hunger and thirst. It was said that it sheltered one from all dangers."

Now, that is the piece missing from our discussions today. I wonder if Artaud wanted his "Theater of Cruelty" to make people afraid in order to triumph over fear. I say this because his essays were written between the wars in the 1930s. World War I was devastating to Europeans. As an American, it's taken me many years to understand to what extent it hurt them. Little by little, I read things and hear things which hint to the trauma...the shadows tormenting those who experienced it. And yet, what I understand is nothing--the Holocaust, Rwanda 1994, Darfur... I don't get it. I digress...


Whereas his contemporaries wanted to take people from their own lives by representing a version of it, Artaud's theater would be more like a vision quest, a grand, fearful hallucination, a possession of the soul--charismatic in its spirituality?!!! If you didn't guess this by now, you should know that Artaud was not successful in implementing his ideas for himself. However, he influenced many directors like Jean Genet, for example.

His objective couldn't have simply been to make people feel fear to be fearless. To what end? Self-realization? Autocreation? Divinity? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!
And it is in this way, Artaud lives on.

By Artaud himself:
Qui suis-je?
D'où je viens?
Je suis Antonin Artaud
et que je le dise
comme je sais le dire
immédiatement
vous verrez mon corps actuel
voler en éclats
et se ramasser
sous dix mille aspects
notoires
un corps neuf
où vous ne pourrez
plus jamais
m'oublier.

Who am I?
Where do I come from.
I am Antonin Artaud
and that I say it
like I know how to say it
immediately
you will see my actual body
fly into pieces
and pick it self up
under 10,000 notable parts (facets)
into a new body
where you will never be able
to forget me.
(my translation)