Antonin Artaud was buried, without rites, on March 8, 1948.
Shall we look over the remainder of Artaud’s work?
Most of us will be surprised that the letters, journals, poems, essays, and various writing projects that comprise the complete works of Antonin Artaud from Gallimard, as edited by Paule Thévenin (a project still incomplete as of this date), so far run to more than twenty-five published volumes! (Some of these are themselves double, with an “a” and a “b” tome.) Looking at them, one feels one is looking at the opera omnia of some 19th Century literary Titan, a Balzac or, perhaps, a Dumas. Could this really be the production of the sickly, deranged Artaud, who comes to us either as the handsome young actor of the ’20s or the frail ghoul of his final years—the ’40s? Dipping here and there among them, however, the reader soon finds that the voluminous poetry, from the 1923 pamphlet Backgammon in the Sky (Tric Trac du del) to The Return of Artaud, le Mômo (Le Retour d’Artaud, le Mômo: “mômo” may also refer to the Greek god Momos, the god of raillery and satire) in 1947, is pained almost beyond endurance—and largely unreadable. In April 1929 Artaud had registered a film script based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae and also published a book of essays, Art and Death. In May of 1933, he’d completed a surrealistic dithyram- bic novel, Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned (published 1934). Known as a revolutionary man of the theater, Artaud nevertheless completed only a single full-length play, and that a cut-down prose adaptation of a closet drama of Shelley’s, by way of a translation of Stendahl’s, The Cenci It is an interesting play, but the interest is almost entirely because Artaud wrote it. A costume historical drama, it looks and feels very similar to a number of works by Cocteau, Giraudoux, Anouilh, and Gelderhode. But it does not work anywhere near as well on stage as the best theater pieces of these other writers.
Artaud wrote some praiseful, mystical essays on Mexico’s Tarahumara Indians (1937), which, for all their glorification of the primitive, are nevertheless almost wholly fascist in their presuppositions—in much the same way as Riefenstahl’s photographic and textual glorifications of the African Nuba tribe are still the underside of the theory of a (if not the) “master race.”
As an actor, a young Artaud had appeared in numerous plays, notably as Tiresias in the scandalous production of Cocteau’s Antigone (1922), with its sets by Pablo Picasso, costumes by Coco Chanel, and music by Arthur Honegger. (Genica Athanasiou, Artaud’s lover at the time, played the title role.) He made brief appearances in two great films: He is Marat in Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) and the young monk in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). There are numerous less distinguished screen roles—at least one of which was in a movie popular with the public for a season, Raymond Bernard’s Tarakanova (1929); and in 1930 he had acted in the French version (unfortunately not the well-known German one with Lotte Lenya) of Pabst’s film of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, as well as Fritz Lang’s Liliom (1934)—in America, the Molnar play of the same name on which the film was based would become Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical Carousel.
There are many brilliant and impassioned letters, journals, brief and luminous notes on theatrical projects, films, and what-have-you.
And there are the handful of lucid and superbly analytical essays.
The most important of these are collected in the 1938 volume The Theater and Its Double, the single work without which (1923-24’s Correspondence with Jacques Rivière excepted) the encounter with Artaud would be almost entirely an encounter with a myth—rather than with a mind.
The double of the theater is, of course, life; and Artaud considered himself deliberately provocative by relegating life to the subordinate position in his title. Still, the book begins with as socially ethical a preface as any Marxist might wish:
I must remark that the world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and that the attempt to orient toward culture thoughts turned only toward hunger is a purely artificial expedient.
But even this most lucid and socially pointed of all Artaud’s works gets under way with a kind of feuilletonage noire, in which theater grows, somehow, mystically, out of the Plague at Marseille in 1720, and ends up in . . . acupuncture! The trip between, however, is brilliant—hugely rich in notions about theater and the general contemporary artistic condition. The wonderful central essay “No More Masterpieces” could stand (and has stood) as a manifesto for the working twentieth-century artist ever since it was written—and makes the modernist criticism of Eliot from the same period, if not Pound’s, seem timid and rather trifling. Still, there is no single and entire book-length work—whether poems, drama, fiction, or, like this one, essays—from Artaud that can be securely and unquestionably accepted into the canon so cavalierly dubbed “literature.” Presumably this would not have bothered him.
“All writing is garbage,” Artaud had declared in his 1925 meditation-cum-prose-poem, “Le Pèse-Nerfs” (“The Nerve-Meter”), and went on writing poems and letters.
How, then, can we account for Artaud’s extraordinary influence? In 1947, a young American, Carl Solomon, went to a reading given by Artaud on the rue Jacob. Back in the United States, “. . .in my incarceration in a psychiatric hospital in Manhattan [The Psychiatric Institute],” Solomon wrote in 1989, “. . . I encountered Allen Ginsberg, a fellow patient who was intrigued by my collection of Paris-acquired books. Among the Artaud, Genêt, Michaux, Miller, and Lautréamont was Isou’s Nouvelle Poesie et un Nouvelle Musique. We discussed all of these things by way of layering the groundwork for Allen’s eventual publication of ’Howl’ in 1956.” But how better to characterize “Howl” than as the textual encounter of Artaud with Whitman? And the earliest works of Artaud to be published in the United States were through City Lights and Grove Press, the two publishing outlets most closely associated with Ginsberg and the Beats. But if one can map the conduits by which Artaud arrived on the American shore, that still does not let us know the specificity of what arrived, besides an atmosphere, an air, a stance. Again, looking for the substance behind that influence, if one turns to the works least tainted by his inarguable dementia—his plays and his essays—the whole phenomenon simply does not make sense.
There is much in The Cenci at one with the wilder of Artaud’s works: the interest in crime, transgression, and cruelty presented in an atmosphere dominated by aphoristic intellectual analysis. But there are works by Artaud both earlier and later (and less aesthetically satisfying overall) in which (nevertheless) it is exactly these elements, which certainly supply the energy behind Artaud, that appear so much more forcefully. Indeed, to consider Artaud’s subsequent influence only in the light of this one play and the more logical and readable essays on art and theater simply will not do, for all their essayistic brilliance. It is as if Wagner had attained to his particular stature by writing only his theoretical works Opera and Drama, Art and Revolution, and The Artwork of the Future—and no other opera than Rienzi!
Artaud presents himself to us, then, as an aesthetic paradox—a problem. And it is as a problem that we will have to explore him to untangle his significance.
II
Richard Wagner loved the body—or certainly he loved what the body could do. Hydrotherapy was a passion with him for a season; so were silk dressing gowns and mountain hikes. Tristan und Isolde (1859) speaks of spiritual love, but we need listen to only a scene of it to realize this is a limpid celebration of total erotic corporeality and a dramatic exploration of its effects on body, mind, and spirit. And amidst the various scenic miscalculations, didn’t that sensuous, incestuous collapse to which Patrice Chereau treated the world at the end of his Walküre, Act I, over PBS in 1983, seem, somehow, right?
Artaud despised and reviled the body. He hated sex and used the social horrors traditionally associated with the most vulgar language to castigate it in all forms. In what we can only call, with generosity, his less lucid periods, the bodily language he used to execrate intercourse, reproduction, even masturbation, make
s the flesh crawl and the mind turn aside from an image of disease ridden with disease. The body for Artaud was only a laboratory, ill-equipped and chaotically organized before a dispersed and distracted master, in which to study, as best he could, the machinery of pain. No other dramatic theorist, including Stanislavski, has had such a sense of the actor as a body in space and time, a living gorge through which must plummet the full range of what men and women may whisper about, murmur over, shriek out, snicker at, weep, laugh or howl before. But if there was anything more cruel in Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” than the unstinging rigor that gave it its name, it was the conception of a translation from mind to physicality through a fine grid of physical and mental hurting that was—if his writing is to be trusted—Artaud’s body from adolescence through its premature senescence and death.
Susan Sontag wrote in 1973 (and has been much quoted for writing it)-
The course of all recent serious theater in Europe and America can be divided into two periods—before Artaud and after Artaud.
—where “after Artaud” (post hoc ergo propter hoc) clearly means because of Artaud.
After Artaud?
Theater-in-the-round; a revival of political street theater; theater in unexpected places; multiple theaters in great centers built especially to display all of theater’s myriad forms; light shows; improvisations; puppets, in all sizes and to all levels of abstraction; the interest in various traditions of Eastern theater. Both the abstract unit set and the infinite complexities of stagecraft one sees in a Broadway musical can be envisioned through Artaud; so can the idea of film as a recognized art form—if it will only consent to be film. And of course the work of such innovators as Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Charles Ludlum, María Irene Fornés, Robert Wilson, Richard Forman, and Ethyl Eichelberger in this country; while to say Brook, Grotowski, or Handke is only to make the flimsiest gesture toward European stage art. Basically, what comes after Artaud is almost anything one might call modern in the theater that does not trace directly back to Brecht—with whom, of course, Artaud overlaps anyway. Not only can all the theatrical trends listed above be traced to Artaud, but their seeds can almost all be found in that slim book of theatrical meditations already cited.
And before Artaud?
It is my intention in this inquiry to examine the fiction that before Artaud there was Richard Wagner and Wagner’s theater—and that, as a paradigm for serious art, there was little else. And it is only against this titantic background that the problem Artaud presents can best be appreciated.
To make this an interesting fiction, however, and worthy of our hermeneutical energies, we must limit it in some severe, some rigorous, some cruel ways.
I do not mean that Wagner was the only artist before Artaud to produce interesting or significant art. I do not mean that Wagner was (though many have claimed it) the greatest artist who ever lived. Perhaps this is the place to mention how I came to Wagner’s music. In my case, a late adolescent love of Anton von Webern developed naturally over the years to include his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, and We- bern’s fellow pupil, Alban Berg. To know any of these composers in depth is to know the respect in which they held Wagner. . . .
III
My first exposure to Wagner’s music-drama was in the summer of 1966. I’d just returned to New York from my first trip to Europe and was living alone in a cluttered apartment on East 6th Street in the city’s Lower East Side—Marilyn had recently removed to an apartment on Henry Street and our relationship was such that I had not gone along. Among scant possibilities for making a little money, an older friend named Ed McCabe suggested to me and another friend of mine, Paul, who lived with his truck-driver lover, Joe, around on Avenue B, that we try “supering” at the Metropolitan Opera, which was about to open with its first production at its new home in the recently-completed Lincoln Center.
Far larger than the old one in the just-demolished Metropolitan Opera House, the new stage at Lincoln Center would require far more “supers” than before. And the house’s opening production was to be particularly lavish.
The word “super” comes from supernumerary—often just called a “spear carrier.” Supers are costumed figures in the opera who neither sing, speak, nor dance, but who fill out the stage picture in the lavish, colorful spectacles.
Supers were not paid for rehearsal.
But they were given fifteen dollars a performance. And so, one afternoon, with Ed and Paul, I reported to the stage door in the white marbled wall of the new theater building to attend the first of half a dozen rehearsals for the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Anthony and Cleopatra, starring Leontyne Price and directed by Franco Zeffirelli, with black dancer Alvin Ailey both as choreographer and assistant director.
The music from Barber’s opera was not popular either with the singers nor—once it premiered—with the public. Largely for technical reasons the production itself was something of a fiasco. A giant turntable that was supposed to be on geared metal wheels had been put on rubber rollers instead to save money—and turned out not to be able to move under the weight of the actors and scenery. Machinery that was to roll a scenic construction from the back of the city-block-deep stage up to the footlights failed to function on opening night. But though I played an angry merchant in the first act’s market scene and an Egyptian slave in Act Two (where, with Paul, under the bluest of blue lights, I carried a couch to center stage and left it there), this is not the place to detail the calamities that deviled the production from rehearsals on through its half-dozen performances. What it meant, however, was that I was allowed to super in a subsequent production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which the Met mounted only a little later that same season.
I was only required in Act Three, where I was one of the burghers who gathers with the others to hear Hans Sachs’s “prize song.” My part was quintessentially simple, and so required that I attend only two rehearsals—one of which I believe I missed. At the cue, I entered with a dozen other black-costumed burghers to stand at one side of a small bridge. We waited through the prize song. At a certain point, drummers entered over the same bridge and stood beside us, while the chorus sang the finale.
Very simple.
The production’s opening night, however, was as dramatic and even more fraught than the Barber. I lingered in the wings, looking out on the broad stage all through Act One. Twenty minutes into it, Justino Diaz, who sang Hans Sachs, developed an extraordinary bloody nose. One of the technicians, lounging beside a TV monitor flickering beside me, commented that Diaz was singing with his face staring almost straight into the flies. Minutes later, in an unscheduled exit, he rushed off, leaving Walter and Beckmesser to sing on alone, and practically bumped into me. I looked around as he grabbed a towel from a distraught dresser, dropped his head, and seemed to spew out mouthfuls of blood! Smearing his face with gore, he spat out more blood; blood ran in cascades from his nose, while the whole, huge backstage area went into spreading chaos among the dozens of technicians, stagehands, administrators, friends—and supers—who fill the cavernous wings of such a theater at any moment in a performance. There were whispers of halting the production, of bringing in the understudy—all of which Diaz protested, vehemently, hoarsely, quietly. A few minutes later, he rushed back out on the stage to sing again.
It went on this way, with exits every five or ten minutes to unload the blood that had collected in the back of his throat: he still sang with his face up, each time more and more streaked with red. In the intermission between Acts One and Two, the bleeding was finally stopped. But all through Act Two, a doctor and nurses waited with us, on the chance that it might start up again, under the part’s considerable physical strain.
Hearing an opera from backstage, especially in a house the size of the Met, is almost a wholly vacuous experience—even when there is no medical emergency. No meaningful stage picture is visible from the wings. The performance is not directed toward you. And there are a lot of ugly sounds—g
asped breaths, rough attacks, and what-have-you—that ordinarily do not make it past the footlights over the orchestra pit but which become egregiously noticeable from so near. Even though various assistants and technical directors are constantly shushing stagehands and technicians, there is so much extraneous noise from the setting of props and the moving of scenery that from so close it is impossible really to hear—or to concentrate on what you hear. The balance between orchestra and principals is so far off as to be ludicrous. The proscenium is not before you to frame what you see: costumed chorus members in their intense make-up mingle with workmen in their greens and blues and technicians in sweaters and jeans, with metal scaffolding all around (invisible from the seats), lights hung every which where, and music always playing through the lights and motion and general hubbub, so that the effect is more like watching a circus rehearsal scattered about the floor of some vast hangar than an artistic performance.
The lights from the flies and from the balconies completely blind anyone out on the stage to the audience. From the center, gazing out into the auditorium, you seem to look only at a dead-black curtain, hung just beyond the apron. Blazing about in it, here and there, are blinding white magnesium flares—so that, in the third act, after I’d filed out to stand on our little bridge, I wasn’t sure, for the first minute or so, if the curtain were open or closed—if, indeed, the music I heard were from the Act Three prelude (outside the curtain) or from the act proper. Were the characters moving around below me getting in place for the act’s beginning, I wondered, or, indeed, had the curtain opened already with the act already in progress . . .?