Antonin Artaud: Poet Without Words

Description

This book traces the development of the major themes in the work of the essential modern poet-playwright, Antonin Artaud. As a young man, Artaud complained that he could neither find the words to express his inner being nor succeed in making language and reality coincide. Toward the end of his life this complaint gave way to a violent and apocalyptic denunciation of literature and language. His work reflects the dilemma of our culture, which has lost all faith in rationality and yet continue to analyze the sickness with the voice of reason, for it has found no other. Artaud's debt to certain movements and philosophical currents - notably surrealism and Eastern mysticism - is acknowledged but at the same time the book shows that the mark of his own agonized sensibility renders everything he wrote undeniably his own. As Janet Flanner points out in her introduction to this volume, Artaud held "extraordinary theories of audience participation and the great cruel power of violence, which both ally him posthumously to the theater and to the world and to the people of today." INTRODUCTION 9 KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS OF ARTAUD'S WORKS 13 I THE MAN 15 II THE SURREALIST YEARS 56 III MYTH AND MAGIC 113 IV RETURN TO THE BODY 160 V CONCLUSION 218 NOTES 229 BIBLIOGRAPHY 235 INDEX 245