The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

Antonin Artaud 1896–1948

marseilles, france

A

n actor turned poet and essayist, Artaud was identified for a short

while with Surrealism and was briefly in charge of its experimental

Dream Center. In 1929 he was expelled from the group, along with

Desnos. In an early essay, he developed the concept of the ‘‘theater of cruelty,’’ in

which participants would not rely on any artificial conventions of society and

would instead use only gesture, movement, and other prelanguage tools. His

work, violent and directed against civilization, was often censured, just as the

writer himself was kept out of society’s view. First confined to a sanitarium in

Marseilles at the age of eighteen, he also spent nine years at the end of his life in

an asylum at Rodez, undergoing repeated shock therapy. Upon his release, he was

remarkably prolific and wrote extensively against psychiatrists and society; an-

guished and exulting in the torment of his mind, he perceived himself and his

language as living examples of the divine. He was much revered by Parisian

writers and artists and in 1947 lectured at the Vieux colombier to André Breton,

Henri Michaux, André Gide, and Albert Camus, among others; the lecture ended

in disaster as the poet scattered his papers in confusion. Principal works: L’Om-

bilic des limbes, 1925; Le Pèse-nerfs, 1925; Le Théâtre et son double, 1938; Van Gogh

et le suicide de la société, 1947; Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, 1948.

The Nerve Meter

You see an actor as if through crystal.

Inspiration with its stairs.

Literature must not too readily pass.

...

In sleep, the nerves extend along the legs. Sleep came from a displacement of
belief, the embrace loosened, the absurd having stepped on my toes.

...