Antonin Artaud

This unrelenting study of Antonin Artaud by Naomi Greene (University of California - Santas Barbara) was published in 1970 but is no less rewarding and iconoclastic today. The literature on Artaud has multiplied since with a stellar essay by Susan Sontag yet to be eclipsed, not to mention Derrida and the poststructuralist wake theoretical theatrics. However no book out there today is capable of tracing the development of the major themes in Artaud's creative intensity. 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. Towards the end of his life this complaint gave way to a violent and apocalyptic denunciation of literature and language. His work refelcts the dilemma of our culture, which has lost all faith in ratonality and yet continues 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, yet this study of the author of "The Theatre and its Double" is most significaqnt for how it ilustrates the agonized sensibility that drove Artaud to become par excelence a poet maudits, an infernal creator endowed with creative gifts and intellectual distress, beauty and violence, the other side of reason, the culimation of truth and the truth of the impossible ability representative art is deceiveing itself that silence will in the end not prevail, each trace and all shadows quivering to a wavelength and a frequency few dare to tune into... An extraordinary introduction by Janet Flanner makes this title an xcellent introduction for the novice and a valuable philosophical treatise for the more seasoned student of asethetics or literary theorists. As much as it provides invaluable reads on Antonin Artaud's sensibility and poetic stronghold, the study does not satisfy as a survey of Artaud's ideas on Theatre and participation, violence and the horror of a void within no one may hope to fill with truth reality and the suff of life. The insanity is a way to make sense of it all....