Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty

To Have Done with the Judgement of God, a radio play by Antonin Artaud



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kré puc te
kré Everything must puk te
pek be arranged li le
kre to a hair pek ti le
e in a fulminating kruk
pte order.

I learned yesterday
(I must be behind the times, or perhaps it's only a false rumor,
one of those pieces of spiteful gossip that are circulated between
sink and latrine at the hour when meals that have been ingurgitated
one more time are thrown in the slop buckets),
I learned yesterday
one of the most sensational of those official practices of American
public schools
which no doubt account for the fact that this country believes itself
to be in the vanguard of progress,
It seems that, among the examinations or tests required of a child
entering public school for the first time, there is the so-called
seminal fluid or sperm test,
which consists of asking this newly entering child for a small
amount of his sperm so it can be placed in a jar
and kept ready for any attempts at artificial insemination that
might later take place.
For Americans are finding more and more that they lack muscle
and children,
that is, not workers
but soldiers,
and they want at all costs and by every possible means to make
and manufacture soldiers
with a view to all the planetary wars which might later take place,
and which would be intended to demonstrate by the overwhelming
virtues of force
the superiority of American products,
and the fruits of American sweat in all fields of activity and of the
superiority of the possible dynamism of force.
Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace nature
wherever it can be replaced,
one must find a major field of action for human inertia,
the worker must have something to keep him busy,
new fields of activity must be created,
in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake manufactured
products,
of all the vile synthetic substitutes
in which beatiful real nature has no part,
and must give way finally and shamefully before all the victorious
substitute products
in which the sperm of all artificial insemination factories
will make a miracle
in order to produce armies and battleships.
No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables, no more plants
pharmaceutical or otherwise and consequently no more food,
but synthetic products to satiety,
amid the fumes,
amid the special humors of the atmosphere, on the particular axes
of atmospheres wrenched violently and synthetically from the
resistances of a nature which has known nothing of war except
fear.
And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for
and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition
that could not fail to arise on all sides,
one must have soldiers, armies, airplanes, battleships,
hence this sperm
which it seems the governments of America have had the effrontery
to think of.
For we have more than one enemy
lying in wait for us, my son,
we, the born capitalists,
and among these enemies
Stalin's Russia
which also doesn't lack armed men.


All this is very well,
but I didn't know the Americans were such a warlike people.
In order to fight one must get shot at
and although I have seen many Americans at war
they always had huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships
that served as their shield.
I have seen machines fighting a lot
but only infinitely far
behind
them have I seen the men who directed them.
Rather than people who feed their horses, cattle, and mules the
last tons of real morphine they have left and replace it with
substitutes made of smoke,
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from
which they were born
I mean the Tarahumara
eating Peyote off the ground
while they are born,
and who kill the sun to establish the kingdom of black night,
and who smash the cross so that the spaces of spaces can never
again meet and cross.

And so you are going to hear the dance of TUTUGURI.





TUTUGURI
The Rite of the Black Sun
And below, as if at the foot of the bitter slope,
cruelly despairing at the heart,
gapes the circle of the six crosses,
very low
as if embedded in the mother earth,
wrenched from the foul embrace of the mother
who drools.

The earth of black coal
is the only damp place
in this cleft rock.


The Rite is that the new sun passes through seven points before
blazing on the orifice of the earth.


And there are six men,
one for each sun,
and a seventh man
who is the sun
in the raw
dressed in black and in red flesh.


But, this seventh man
is a horse,
a horse with a man leading him.


But it is the horse
who is the sun
and not the man.


At the anguish of a drum and a long trumpet,
strange,
the six men
who were lying down,
rolling level with the ground,
leap up one by one like sunflowers,
not like suns
but turning earths,
water lilies,
and each leap
corresponds to the increasingly somber
and restrained
gong of the drum
until suddenly he comes galloping, at vertiginous speed,
the last sun,
the first man,
the black horse with a

naked man,
absolutely naked
and virgin
riding it.

After they leap up, they advance in winding circles
and the horse of bleeding meat rears
and prances without a stop
on the crest of his rock
until the six men
have surrounded
completely
the six crosses.


Now, the essence of the Rite is precisely


THE ABOLITION OF THE CROSS.
When they have stopped turning
they uproot
the crosses of earth
and the naked man
on the horse
holds up
an enormous horseshoe
which he has dipped in a gash of his blood.






The Pursuit of Fecality
There where it smells of shit
it smells of being.
Man could just as well not have shat,
not have opened the anal pouch,
but he chose to shit
as he would have chosen to live
instead of consenting to live dead.


Because in order not to make caca,
he would have had to consent
not to be,
but he could not make up his mind to lose
being,
that is, to die alive.


There is in being
something particularly tempting for man
and this something is none other than
CACA.
(Roaring here.)

To exist one need only let oneself be,
but to live,
one must be someone,
to be someone,
one must have a BONE,
not be afraid to show the bone,
and to lose the meat in the process.


Man has always preferred meat
to the earth of bones.
Because there was only earth and wood of bone,
and he had to earn his meat,
there was only iron and fire
and no shit,
and man was afraid of losing shit
or rather he desired shit
and, for this, sacrificed blood.


In order to have shit,
that is, meat,
where there was only blood
and a junkyard of bones
and where there was no being to win
but where there was only life to lose.



o reche modo
to edire
di za
tau dari
do padera coco

At this point, man withdrew and fled.


Then the animals ate him.


It was not a rape,
he lent himself to the obscene meal.


He relished it,
he learned himself
to act like an animal
and to eat rat
daintily.


And where does this foul debasement come from?

The fact that the world is not yet formed,
or that man has only a small idea of the world
and wants to hold on to it forever?


This comes from the fact that man,
one fine day,
stopped
the idea of the world.


Two paths were open to him:
that of the infinite without,
that of the infinitesimal within.


And he chose the infinitesimal within.
Where one need only squeeze
the spleen,
the tongue,
the anus
or the glans.


And god, god himself squeezed the movement.


Is God a being?
If he is one, he is shit.
If he is not one
he does not exist.


But he does not exist,
except as the void that approaches with all its forms
whose most perfect image
is the advance of an incalculable group of crab lice.


"You are mad Mr. Artaud, what about the mass?"


I deny baptism and the mass.
There is no human act,
on the internal erotic level,
more pernicious than the descent
of the so-called jesus-christ
onto the altars.


No one will believe me
and I can see the public shrugging its shoulders
but the so-called christ is none other than he
who in the presence of the crab louse god
consented to live without a body,
while an army of men
descended from a cross,
to which god thought he had long since nailed them,
has revolted,
and, armed with steel,
with blood,
with fire, and with bones,
advances, reviling the Invisible
to have done with GOD'S JUDGMENT.






The Question Arises ...
What makes it serious
is that we know
that after the order
of this world
there is another.

What is it like?


We do not know.


The number and order of possible suppositions in
this realm
is precisely
infinity!


And what is infinity?


That is precisely what we do not know!


It is a word
that we use
to indicate
the opening
of our consciousness
toward possibility
beyond measure,
tireless and beyond measure.


And precisely what is consciousness?


That is precisely what we do not know.


It is nothingness.


A nothingness
that we use
to indicate
when we do not know something
from what side
we do not know it
and so
we say
consciousness,
from the side of consciousness,
but there are a hundred thousand other sides.


Well?


It seems that consciousness
in us is
linked
to sexual desire
and to hunger;


but it could
just as well
not be linked
to them.


One says,
one can say,
there are those who say
that consciousness
is an appetite,
the appetite for living;


and immediately
alongside the appetite for living,
it is the appetite for food
that comes immediately to mind;


as if there were not people who eat
without any sort of appetite;
and who are hungry.


For this too
exists
to be hungry
without appetite;


well?


Well
the space of possibility
was given to me one day
like a loud fart
that I will make;
but neither of space,
nor possibility,
did I know precisely what it was,


and I did not feel the need to think about it,


they were words
invented to define things
that existed
or did not exist
in the face of
the pressing urgency
of a need:
the need to abolish the idea,
the idea and its myth,
and to enthrone in its place
the thundering manifestation
of this explosive necessity:
to dilate the body of my internal night,


the internal nothingness
of my self


which is night,
nothingness,
thoughtlessness,


but which is explosive affirmation
that there is
something
to make room for:


my body.


And truly
must it be reduced to this stinking gas,
my body?
To say that I have a body
because I have a stinking gas
that forms
inside me?


I do not know
but
I do know that


space,
time,
dimension,
becoming,
future,
destiny,
being,
non-being,
self,
non-self,

are nothing to me;

but there is a thing
which is something,
only one thing
which is something,
and which I feel
because it wants
TO GET OUT:
the presence
of my bodily
suffering,


the menacing,
never tiring
presence
of my
body;


however hard people press me with questions
and however vigorously I deny all questions,
there is a point
at which I find myself compelled
to say no,



NO
then
to negation;


and this point
comes when they press me,


when they pressure me
and when they handle me
until the exit
from me
of nourishment,
of my nourishment
and its milk,


and what remains?


That I am suffocated;


and I do not know if it is an action
but in pressing me with questions this way
until the absence
and nothingness
of the question
they pressed me
until the idea of body
and the idea of being a body
was suffocated
in me,


and it was then that I felt the obscene


and that I farted
from folly
and from excess
and from revolt
at my suffocation.


Because they were pressing me
to my body
and to the very body


and it was then
that I exploded everything
because my body
can never be touched.






Conclusion
- And what was the purpose of this broadcast, Mr. Artaud?

- Primarily to denounce certain social obscenities officially sanctioned and acknowledged:

this emission of infantile sperm donated by children for the artificial insemination of fetuses yet to be born and which will be born in a century or more.

To denounce, in this same American people who occupy the whole surface of the former Indian continent, a rebirth of that warlike imperialism of early America that caused the pre-Columbian Indian tribes to be degraded by the aforesaid people.

- You are saying some very bizarre things, Mr. Artaud.

- Yes, I am saying something bizarre, that contrary to everything we have been led to believe, the pre-Columbian Indians were a strangely civilized people and that in fact they knew a form of civilization based exclusively on the principle of cruelty.

- And do you know precisely what is meant by cruelty?

- Offhand, no, I don't.

- Cruelty means eradicating by means of blood and until blood flows, god, the bestial accident of unconscious human animality, wherever one can find it.

- Man, when he is not restrained, is an erotic animal,
he has in him an inspired shudder,
a kind of pulsation
that produces animals without number which are the form that the ancient tribes of the earth universally attributed to god.
This created what is called a spirit.
Well, this spirit originating with the American Indians is reappearing all over the world today under scientific poses which merely accentuate its morbid infectuous power, the marked condition of vice, but a vice that pullulates with diseases,
because, laugh if you like,
what has been called microbes

is god,
and do you know what the Americans and the Russians use to make their atoms?
They make them with the microbes of god.
- You are raving, Mr. Artaud.
You are mad.

- I am not raving.
I am not mad.
I tell you that they have reinvented microbes in order to impose a new idea of god.


They have found a new way to bring out god and to capture him in his microbic noxiousness.


This is to nail him though the heart,
in the place where men love him best,
under the guise of unhealthy sexuality,
in that sinister appearance of morbid cruelty that he adopts
whenever he is pleased to tetanize and madden humanity as he
is doing now.


He utilizes the spirit of purity and of a consciousness that has
remained candid like mine to asphyxiate it with all the false
appearances that he spreads universally through space and this
is why Artaud le Mômo can be taken for a person suffering
from hallucinations.


- What do you mean, Mr. Artaud?


- I mean that I have found the way to put an end to this ape once and for all
and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody believes more and more in man.

So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate.

- How's that?


How's that?

No matter how one takes you you are mad, ready for the straitjacket.
- By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,



god,
and with god
his organs.

For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.


When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.


They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.

Six Litanies For Heliogabalus, by John Zorn, dedicated to Antonin Artaud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdUCZD1M2v0&feature=related
Voice of Artaud.

Hey Eddie...just logged on and am now in downtown Cairns. I'm surrounded by upmarket backpackers speaking in a range of interesting English accents or in colourful foreign languages. The internet connection is fast but either the seats are low or the desk is high because my foot is going numb as I type because I'm sitting on it in an effort to raise myself up to the keyboard. The computer prince salvaged all of my music, photos and word files...oh happy day! I'm going home in two days and will be online as soon as I unpack the car.
I see you've been busy here.

Hi there, Moony.

Hope you had a relaxing time.

It'll be good to see you back here again.

Artaud to Nin

in the arena
unsheltered and huddled
his audience shocked into feeling

ignited
the primal hovers
and drops

in the wings
he whispers to Nin
for this

vague anxieties released
in the first scream…
blood-lust in the second

then the audience leave with clean hands.

in the wings
he whispers to Nin
for this

Blue Moon


Anais Nin
"The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion.
At first people gasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughing! They hissed. Then, one by one, they began to leave, noisily, talking, protesting. They banged the door as they left. The only ones who did not move were Allendy, his wife, the Lalous, Marguerite. More protestations. More jeering. But Artaud went on, until the last gasp. And stayed on the floor. Then when the hall had emptied of all but his small group of friends, he walked straight up to me and kissed my hand. He asked me to go to the cafe with him. "
— Anaïs Nin

^

Was this a description of AA's lecture at the Vieux Colombier after he'd been released from the loony bin?

eddie wrote:^ Was this a description of AA's lecture at the Vieux Colombier after he'd been released from the loony bin?

...no eddie...it was at the Sorbonne 14 years earlier.

Artaud gave 3 public lectures:...he was...er...madly theatrical at all three.

SORBONNE 1933...about The Theatre and the Plague.
BRUSSELLS 1937...subject 'the decomposition of Paris'
VIEUX-COLUMBIER in 1947 (after release from the asylums)...he began by reading some poems before launching into 'wild improvisation'

Anaïs Nin and Artaud at the Sorbonne 1933
On 6 April 1933, the writer Anaïs Nin attended a lecture given by Antonin Artaud at the Sorbonne
on the subject ‘Theatre and the Plague’. She sat in the front row because he had asked her to.

...Nin continues from the above (...^...^...) text:
He asked meto go the the cafe.Artaud and I walked out in a fine mist. We walked, walked
through the dark streets. He was hurt, wounded, baffled by the jeering. He spat
out his anger. “They always want to hear about; they want to hear an objective
conference on the Theatre and the Plague, I want to give them the experience
itself. The plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken. I want to awaken
them. Because they do not realise they are dead. Their death is total, like
deafness and blindness. This is agony I portrayed. Mine, yes, and everyone who
is alive... I feel sometimes that I am not writing, but describing the struggles
with writing, the struggles of birth.”

The following extract is from her diary a month earlier:
(from:http://www.cyberpagedd.com/gaffield_knight/academic/antonin_artaud.htm)

In her diary for March 1933 Anaïs Nin gives a vivid picture of Artaud, whom she had met because she was a student of psychoanalysis with Dr. Allendy:

Artaud. Lean, taut. A haunt face with visionary eyes. A sardonic manner. Now weary, now fiery and malicious. The theatre for him, is a place to shout pain, anger, hatred, to enact the violence in us. . . . He is the drugged, contracted being who walks always alone, who is seeking to produce plays which are like scenes of torture. His eyes are blue with languor, black with pain. He is all nerves. Yet he was beautiful acting the monk in love with Joan of Arc in the Carl Dreyer film. . . . Allendy had told me that he had tried to free Artaud of the drug habit which was destroying him. All I could see that evening was his revolt against interpretations. He was impatient with their presence, as if they prevented him from exaltation. He talked with fire about the Cabala, magic, myths, legends. [The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. I, pp. 195-96.] [47]

Artaud was writing his book on Heliogabalus, and long love letters to Nin. While meeting at a café in June, pouring out poetry, talking of magic, he told her, "People think I am mad." Then he asked, "Do you think I am mad? Is that what frightens you?" If she responded to him directly, we'll never know, but she answers in her diary:

I knew at the moment, by his eyes, that he was, and that I loved his madness. I looked at his mouth, with the edges darkened by laudanum, a mouth I did not want to kiss. To be kissed by Artaud was to be drawn towards death, towards insanity. "I am Heliogabalus, the mad Roman emperor, because he becomes everything he writes about." In the taxi he pushed back his hair from his ravaged face. The beauty of the summer day did not touch him. He stood up in the taxi and, stretching out his arms, he pointed to the crowded streets: "The revolution will come soon. All this will be destroyed. The world must be destroyed. It is corrupt and dull of ugliness. It is full of mummies, I tell you. Roman decadence. Death. I wanted a theatre that would be like a shock treatment, galvanize, shock people into feeling." For the first time it seemed to me that Artaud was living in such a fantasy world that it was for himself he wanted a violent shock, to feel the reality of it, or the incarnating power of a great passion. But as he stood and shouted and spat with fury, the crowd stared at him and the taxi driver became nervous. (Ibid., pp. 238-239) [48]'

"I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide,
but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit,
made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat."
Antonin artaud

Antonin Artaud - Letter to the Medical Directors of Lunatic Asylums

Notes from a Theatre of Cruelty

by ANTONIN ARTAUD
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I employ the word "cruelty" in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor, an implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness; it is the consequence of an act. Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theatre must be rebuilt.

Gifted actors find by instinct how to tap and radiate certain powers; but they would be astonished if it were revealed that these powers, which have their material trajectory by and in the organs, actually exist, for they never realized that these sources of energy actually exist in their own bodies, in their organs.

Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to the quotidian and the ordinary, is the cause of the theater's abasement and its fearful loss of energy, which has finally reached its lowest point.

The belief in a fluid materiality of the soul is indispensable to the actor's craft. To know that a passion is material, that it is subject to the plastic fluctuations of the material, makes accessible an empire of passions that extend our sovereignty.

Furthermore, when we speak the word "life", it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from the surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. And if there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, when instead we should become as victims burning at the stake, signaling each other through the flames.

And what is infinity ? We do not know exactly. It is a word we use to indicate WIDENING of our consciousness towards an inordinate, inexhaustible feasibility.

To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what it does not ordinarily express. It is to make use of it in a new, exceptional and unaccustomed fashion; to reveal its possibilities for producing physical shock; to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their power to shatter as well as to really manifest something and finally, to consider language as Incantation.

The true purpose of the theatre is to create Myths, to express life in its immense universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves.

If our life lacks a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force. No matter how loudly we clamor for magic in our lives, we are really afraid of pursuing an existence entirely under its influence and sign.

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Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (born September 4, 1896, in Marseille; died March 4, 1948 in Paris) was a French playwright, poet, actor and director.

In his book The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly ritualized physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he called a "Theatre of Cruelty". By cruelty, he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all expression is physical expression in space.