Volume 10, Number 4 · February 29, 1968
Poet of Unreason
By John Weightman
Artaud Anthology
edited by Jack Hirschman
City Lights Books, 253 pp., $3.00 (paperback) (paper)
Antonin Artaud is known in the English-speaking world almost exclusively as an influence on the theater. He was the inventor of the term 'Theater of Cruelty,' which has become a catchword in recent years, especially since the presentation of the Artaud-inspired spectacle, Marat-Sade, written by Peter Weiss and staged by Peter Brook. It is fashionable to refer with respect to his collection of essays on the theater, Le théâtre et son double, which fills most of Volume IV of the complete works, now in process of publication by Gallimard. No doubt his name will always have a place in the history of the drama, after those of Gordon Craig, Stanislavsky, and Jacques Copeau, and will remain associated with a certain theatrical tendency that I shall try to define in a moment. But in France his position extends beyond the theater, and indeed beyond any literary genre. Although he seems to have written incessantly in a sort of violent poetic prose which he scattered in all directions, his actual compositions have always been less well known than his personality. His prestige in literary circles depends in the first place on the fact that he was an abnormal individual, totally committed to the expression or exploration of his abnormality and quite oblivious of any of the requirements of ordinary living.
Review, 1983 words
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