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Collected Works: Volume One
Collection of plays, letters, and essays. The first volume of the "Collected Works" contains the important correspondence with Jacques Riviere, and Artaud's extraordinary explorations of consciousness and creativity in Umbilico Limbo and Nerve Scales, as well as essays on life and death, suicide, drugs, lunacy, religion and art, poems, manifestos, the terrifying short play The Spurt of Bloodletters and other material. This important volume is essential to an understanding of the art and theater of our time and will give endless pleasure and information to its readers. Translated and with an introduction by Victor Corti.
Contents:
Correspondence with Jacques Rivière --
Umbilical limbo --
Nerve scales --
Art and death --
Unpublished prose and poetry --
Cup and ball --
Seven letters --
Appendix.
Contents:
Correspondence with Jacques Rivière --
Umbilical limbo --
Nerve scales --
Art and death --
Unpublished prose and poetry --
Cup and ball --
Seven letters --
Appendix.
247 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
11 people are currently reading
148 people want to read
About the author
Antonin Artaud
276 books782 followersFrench surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud advocated a deliberately shocking and confrontational style of drama that he called "theater of cruelty."
People better knew Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, an essayist, actor, and director.
Considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern theory, Antonin Artaud associated with artists and experimental groups in Paris during the 1920s.
Political differences then resulted in him breaking and founding the theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together, they expected to create a forum for works to change radically. Artaud especially expressed disdain for west of the day, panned the ordered plot and scripted language that his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and recorded his ideas in such works as Le Theatre de la cruaute and The Theatre and Its Double .
Artaud thought to represent reality and to affect the much possible audience and therefore used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements.
Artaud wanted that the "spectacle" that "engulfed and physically affected" this audience, put in the middle. He referred to this layout like a "vortex," a "trapped and powerless" constantly shifting shape.
People better knew Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, an essayist, actor, and director.
Considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern theory, Antonin Artaud associated with artists and experimental groups in Paris during the 1920s.
Political differences then resulted in him breaking and founding the theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together, they expected to create a forum for works to change radically. Artaud especially expressed disdain for west of the day, panned the ordered plot and scripted language that his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and recorded his ideas in such works as Le Theatre de la cruaute and The Theatre and Its Double .
Artaud thought to represent reality and to affect the much possible audience and therefore used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements.
Artaud wanted that the "spectacle" that "engulfed and physically affected" this audience, put in the middle. He referred to this layout like a "vortex," a "trapped and powerless" constantly shifting shape.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 6, 2009
Reading Artaud is a very draining experience and a difficult process. There isn't a linear goal with a narrative with premises leading to a conclusion. To understand Artaud is to undergo a process where he tries to induce his psychological state onto the reader; it is interesting that this type of writing borders on the edge of what writing is capable of doing. Writers, as the (brilliant) introductory Sontag essay references, such as Sade and Reich attempt to traverse within this nebulous territory of writing in extremis. With Artaud, what he is trying to communicate, even though it borders on the edge on the possibility of language, is the intense suffering he is going through. It really isn't pleasurable and you don't get a feeling of joy, or a sense of carelessness, abandon, and ultimately a sense of fulfilment which one can (free)associate with the surrealists who operate on the principles of play, whim, and ultimately joy. With Artaud, it seems as if you have art subordinated under a moralistic principle of having a purpose, yet this purpose is so horrific and so painful that ultimately, if art is executed properly, can only shock and shatter the coordinates of the real that the audience has constructed as a safe form of distancing. For example, in his notable theatre of cruelty essay in the Theatre and its Double, he advocates shattering this artificial barrier between audience and performance where there exists a conspiracy among set, setting, and spectator, the three operating in creating an illusion which isn't really grounded in illusion. Even though theatre is an illusion, we must in supension knowing that it is an illusion. We cannot know it is a lie that masks the truth; all art lies- Artaud. He has this moralistic principle of what art ought to be that is written in the most honest prose possible.
When you look at his life, the intense amount of pain the poor man went through: electroshock therapy, being confined to insane asylums, heroin addiction, severe migranes, the rejection of the actual practice of his theories whereas the actual theoretical principles were extremely influential. It must be very distressing to see the failure of the existence of a correspondence between praxis and theory, which begs the question that it is truly the insane which have created this solipstistic universe that reinforces their convictions independent of the strictures of reality and the social universe. Only a madman could produce a treatise on the theory of the theater of cruelty which is only justified within the logic of its own internal convoluted self-correcting paradigm. Its execution when mediated through the social universe comes crashing down and fails to materialize.
His short play a spurt of blood is crazy. Hallucinatory scenes include: two stars colliding and a bunch of bugs falling out, scorpians emerging from a vagina, a woman biting the wrist of god and blood spills all over, a nun with huge bosoms which are grappled by a knight.
Other highlights include: all writing is pig shit, artaud the momo, and his radio play.
Read and shudder.
When you look at his life, the intense amount of pain the poor man went through: electroshock therapy, being confined to insane asylums, heroin addiction, severe migranes, the rejection of the actual practice of his theories whereas the actual theoretical principles were extremely influential. It must be very distressing to see the failure of the existence of a correspondence between praxis and theory, which begs the question that it is truly the insane which have created this solipstistic universe that reinforces their convictions independent of the strictures of reality and the social universe. Only a madman could produce a treatise on the theory of the theater of cruelty which is only justified within the logic of its own internal convoluted self-correcting paradigm. Its execution when mediated through the social universe comes crashing down and fails to materialize.
His short play a spurt of blood is crazy. Hallucinatory scenes include: two stars colliding and a bunch of bugs falling out, scorpians emerging from a vagina, a woman biting the wrist of god and blood spills all over, a nun with huge bosoms which are grappled by a knight.
Other highlights include: all writing is pig shit, artaud the momo, and his radio play.
Read and shudder.
December 12, 2018
It becomes immediately apparent that Artaud was not one who was situated at the fringes of all things--of society, of his associations, of his self--but one who had breached the borders and
became utterly lost within the dangerous territory that lay beyond.
His severe mental illness seems evident in the bizarre associations he
makes between two concepts, although the strength of his prose is born of his peculiar brand of perverse lyricism. .
For all of Artaud's evident strangeness, it seems ironic that he would be banished from the Surrealists since he alone seems to have best represented the Surrealist ideal, but it was his rejection of Surrealism's alignment with Communism and its consequential focus on more base and unextraordinary desires such as an 8-hour work day and what-not. .
Because of his oftentimes debilitating physical illness as well as his festering mental illness that was given wing to fly into increasingly stranger realms of the unconscious, Artaud was one who was perpetually suspended on the *otherside; the other side of Surrealism, the other side of good health, the other side of life, the other side of the self. Artaud seemed to curse the void cast by consciousness between the mind and the body, and struggled to reconcile the dual existence of the two, to align the Artaud of flesh with the distant Artaud of mind and spirit. .
Years ago I became fascinated with Surrealism, and naturally my fascination extended to its helmsman, Andre Breton, but my interest in Breton has since dissipated along with my interest in what I now regard as the dreary and dull consequence of their pursuit of psychic automatism. In Artaud, I find an ally who stands against this movement I once thought fascinating and, in a certain sense, symbolizes to some degree a turning against my former self.
It was Breton who praised the virtue of living within a glass house, where everything within is turned outward, where nothing could remain hidden and where every thought and desire would be recorded and made known. it is no surprise, then, that the pamphlet in which he attacked Artaud was entitled In the Open. Artaud's vicious rebuke was entitled In the Dark, effectively casting a definite fissure between two opposing sets of values. Whereas once I stood on Breton's side in the open, as I've grown older and shifted my interests and values, experienced certain radical reformations in my worldview, and have turned my obsessive focus on to vastly different things, I find myself more and more drawn to the other side, content these days to remain in the dark.
became utterly lost within the dangerous territory that lay beyond.
His severe mental illness seems evident in the bizarre associations he
makes between two concepts, although the strength of his prose is born of his peculiar brand of perverse lyricism. .
For all of Artaud's evident strangeness, it seems ironic that he would be banished from the Surrealists since he alone seems to have best represented the Surrealist ideal, but it was his rejection of Surrealism's alignment with Communism and its consequential focus on more base and unextraordinary desires such as an 8-hour work day and what-not. .
Because of his oftentimes debilitating physical illness as well as his festering mental illness that was given wing to fly into increasingly stranger realms of the unconscious, Artaud was one who was perpetually suspended on the *otherside; the other side of Surrealism, the other side of good health, the other side of life, the other side of the self. Artaud seemed to curse the void cast by consciousness between the mind and the body, and struggled to reconcile the dual existence of the two, to align the Artaud of flesh with the distant Artaud of mind and spirit. .
Years ago I became fascinated with Surrealism, and naturally my fascination extended to its helmsman, Andre Breton, but my interest in Breton has since dissipated along with my interest in what I now regard as the dreary and dull consequence of their pursuit of psychic automatism. In Artaud, I find an ally who stands against this movement I once thought fascinating and, in a certain sense, symbolizes to some degree a turning against my former self.
It was Breton who praised the virtue of living within a glass house, where everything within is turned outward, where nothing could remain hidden and where every thought and desire would be recorded and made known. it is no surprise, then, that the pamphlet in which he attacked Artaud was entitled In the Open. Artaud's vicious rebuke was entitled In the Dark, effectively casting a definite fissure between two opposing sets of values. Whereas once I stood on Breton's side in the open, as I've grown older and shifted my interests and values, experienced certain radical reformations in my worldview, and have turned my obsessive focus on to vastly different things, I find myself more and more drawn to the other side, content these days to remain in the dark.
January 21, 2022
Antonin Artaud, along with Bertolt Brecht, is considered "the leading figure of European theatre in the twentieth century". Indeed, Artaud is "chiefly known in English for his work in the theatre". With the publication of Artaud's Collected Works, in four volumes, English readers have been granted access to the range of Artaud's literary output, which extends well beyond his contributions to the theatre.
The first volume of Artaud's Collected Works is divided into two parts that contain seven works: "Correspondence with Jacques Rivière", "Umbilical Limbo", "Nerve Scales", "Art and Death", "Unpublished Prose and Poetry", "Cup and Ball", and "Seven Letters"; along with an Appendix that includes Early Poems and other uncollected works...
From "Correspondence with Jacques Rivière"...
From "Umbilical Limbo"...
From "Art and Death"...
From "Cup and Ball"...
The first volume of Artaud's Collected Works is divided into two parts that contain seven works: "Correspondence with Jacques Rivière", "Umbilical Limbo", "Nerve Scales", "Art and Death", "Unpublished Prose and Poetry", "Cup and Ball", and "Seven Letters"; along with an Appendix that includes Early Poems and other uncollected works...
From "Correspondence with Jacques Rivière"...
Dear Sir,
..............................................................................
My mental life is completely shot through with petty doubts and unarguably certainties that are expressed in lucid and coherent words. And my weaknesses are of more trembling texture. They are themselves nebulous and ill-formulated. They have live roots, roots of anguish that reach the heart of life. But they have not turmoil of life. One does not feel in them the cosmic afflatus of a soul that has been shaken to its foundations. They are the weaknesses of a mind that have not pondered its weakness; if it had, it would render that weakness in dense and forceful words. And there, sir, lies the entire problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and material clarity of a feeling, to have them to such a degree that the feeling cannot but express itself, to have a wealth of words and formal constructions which might join in the dance, might serve one’s purpose – and at the very moment when the soul is about to organize its wealth, its discoveries, its revelation, at the unconscious moment when the thing is about to emanate, a higher and evil will attacks the soul like vitriol, attacks the word-and-image mass, attacks the mass of the feeling and leaves me painting as at the very door of life.
Now suppose that I feel physical the passing of this will, suppose that it shakes me with sudden, unexpected electricity, with repeated electricity. Supposed that each of my pondered instants is on certain shaken by these deep tornadoes which are not betrayed by anything external. And tell me whether any work of literature is compatible with such states. What brain could resist them? What personality would not be dissolved in them? If only I had the strength, I would sometimes indulge myself, in thought, in the luxury of subjecting to the mortification of such pressing pain any prominent mind, any writer, young or old, who produces and whose new-born thought carries weight in order to see what remained of him. One must not be to hasty in judging men, one must trust them to the point of absurdity, to their very dregs. These foolhardy works often seem to you the product of a mind which is not yet in possession of itself and which perhaps never will posses itself, but who knows what brain they conceal, what power of life, what mental fever which circumstances alone have reduced. Enough about myself and about my works that are still unborn. All I ask is to feel my brain.
Antonin Artaud- Letter dated 6 June 1924, pg. 41-42
From "Umbilical Limbo"...
YOUNG MAN: I love you and everything is fine.
GIRL [in a quickened, throbbing voice]: You love me and everything is fine.
YOUNG MAN [lower]: I love you and everything is fine.
GIRL [lower still]: You love me and everything is fine.
YOUNG MAN [suddenly turns aside]: I love you.
[Silence]
YOUNG MAN: Face me.
GIRL [suddenly turns aside]: There.
YOUNG MAN [in an exalted, high-pitched tone]: I love you. I am great, I am lucid, I am full, I am dense.
GIRL [same high-pitched tone]: We love each other.
YOUNG MAN: We are intense. Ah, what a well-made world.
[Silence: Noise like a huge wheel spinning, blowing out wind. A hurricane comes between them. At that moment two stars collide, and a succession of limbs of flesh fall. Then feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticoes, temples, and alembics, falling slower and slower as if through space, then three scorpions one after the other and finally a frog, and a scarab which lands with heart-breaking, nauseating slowness.]
YOUNG MAN [shouting at the top of his voice]: Heaven's gone crazy.
[Looks up at the sky.]
YOUNG MAN: Let's run off.
[Pushes the GIRL off ahead of him]- Spurt of Blood, pg. 62-63
From "Art and Death"...
Who, in the heart of some anxiety at the bottom of certain dreams, has not know death as a marvelous, disruptive feeling which could never be confused with anything else of a mental order? One must have experienced with this exhausting crescendo of anguish which comes over one in waves and then swells one up as if forced by some unbearable bellows. Anguish which draws near then withdraws, each time stronger, more ponderous and replete. This is the body itself, having reached the limit of its strength and distension, and yet must go on. It is a sort of suction cup on the soul, whose acridity spread like acid into the furthermost bounds of the senses. And the soul cannot even fall back on a breakdown. For this distension itself is false. Death is not so easily satisfied. In the order of physical experience, this distension is like an inverted image of the contraction which takes possession of the mind over the whole extend of the living body.
[...]- Who, in their heart..., pg. 89
From "Cup and Ball"...
The sexual street comes to life
Along the ill-shaped fronts,
The cafés, chirping with crimes,
Uproot the avenues.
Sex's hands burn their pockets
While their bellies seethe down below;
The thoughts all clash,
The head less than the holes.- The Street, pg. 160
December 9, 2009
As with most "Collected Works", some of the items included herein are of dubious worth, like Artaud's early unpublished poems (utterly unexceptional) and some of his letters to friends. To be fair, those two items are shoved in the back of what is an otherwise awesome book. The "short stories" (more like prose poems really) are all amazing and some of his more classic essays, which I'd already read via the Anthology, are in Volume 1. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in volatile minds, explosive language, experimental writing, surrealism (which Artaud has beef with, he's a nice sort of counterpoint to surrealism rather than a surrealist himself), spirituality, or psychoanalysis. Extremely powerful.
November 17, 2008
Either this volume or Volume 2, when I read it, I felt like I was reading myself. I found in Antonin Artaud a kindred, so much so that I went as him for Holloween one year.
December 30, 2021
Here Artaud must be the original edgelord - the entire collection reads like a hormonal teen ranting against the world and how misunderstood they are.
He whines about moral decay and how anyone who disagrees with him are swine (but nobody could possibly understand him because his mental illness leaves him oh so mysterious and enigmatic), all the while hypocritically expressing his own decay through sexually grotesque prose that objectifies women.
His poetry is banal and insipid in its attempts at some kind of dark profundity.
I remember reading Theatre and its Double in school and finding it daring and inspiring - this collection however leaves me wondering why anyone bothered to publish it. It’s inane and pointless.
He whines about moral decay and how anyone who disagrees with him are swine (but nobody could possibly understand him because his mental illness leaves him oh so mysterious and enigmatic), all the while hypocritically expressing his own decay through sexually grotesque prose that objectifies women.
His poetry is banal and insipid in its attempts at some kind of dark profundity.
I remember reading Theatre and its Double in school and finding it daring and inspiring - this collection however leaves me wondering why anyone bothered to publish it. It’s inane and pointless.
October 17, 2022
The last quarter of the book contains the best work, though I did really enjoy Heloise and Abelard, and Transparent Abelard.
April 18, 2025
now what in the world
March 29, 2008
The first volume of his collected works. I am not sure if it follows the original French collected editions - but it's great to have the entire set. I think there are four??? Maybe more? Nevertheless Artaud is a major poet of the theater world and a fascinating character beyond that. A man who had trouble expressing himself and sort of invented a new form of theater to use that expression. Volume one is his early works, and for sure worth having. Also the Susan Sontag and Jack Hirschman editions are great as well.
September 24, 2007
well, i don't think i made it all the way through this book, but he is a mad genius. if you aren't easily offended and don't mind being confused, read some fucking artaud.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews