Artaud Anthology
by Antonin Artaud
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""I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self." Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom. To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with show more every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity. This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense."--BOOK JACTET. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
As usual, I have an earlier edition of this w/ a different cover - before ISBNs. Artaud, you difficult human being you. Thank goodness, you existed. I wish you'd been happy, I wish I were happy, but I DON'T WISH YOU'D BEEN LIKE MOST OF THE MORONS IN THE WORLD. No degree of happiness is worth that fate. You gave a hard look at life & you let it fuck you up. You burned, you lived, you died, & you left a legacy well worth studying.
Bought this one at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, which is actually a log cabin in the woods off of CA-1. I enjoy reading Artaud, king of surrealism, and every once in a while I pick this one up and read a few pages. Always illuminating.
Bought this one at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, which is actually a log cabin in the woods off of CA-1. I enjoy reading Artaud, king of surrealism, and every once in a while I pick this one up and read a few pages. Always illuminating.
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ThingScore 100
The last time Jack Hirschman and I met, it did not work out too well. It was my fault. No, it was HIS: he was not as drunk as I. Nonetheless, the bastard has done a beautiful job of assembly, and with the exception of one or two of his translators, Artaud comes upon us —straight shot, no chaser. The only way to take him...
“All Writing is Pigshit,” page 38, defines for me (at least) show more something that I have always thought—that (along with the world) the artists, the writers are also intolerable... Dr. Gachet, under whom Van Gogh was treated, is given much of the responsibility for Van Gogh’s suicide. Artaud has it in for the good Doctors and Medicine, as would any intelligent man who has spent any time in hospitals and institutions. It becomes more and more clear that Medicine’s first impulse is to make money. Its second? To torture the patient, kill him if at all possible... Artaud speaks strongly because he is one of those rare Artists who did not bother to fool himself or anybody else. His clarity, his hard brittle lines, his disgust with the Lie, are nothing but the results of a man squeezed to pieces by Life, by the massive horror of the realization that his fellow men, his fellow Artists were, in a sense, only “pigshit.” show less
“All Writing is Pigshit,” page 38, defines for me (at least) show more something that I have always thought—that (along with the world) the artists, the writers are also intolerable... Dr. Gachet, under whom Van Gogh was treated, is given much of the responsibility for Van Gogh’s suicide. Artaud has it in for the good Doctors and Medicine, as would any intelligent man who has spent any time in hospitals and institutions. It becomes more and more clear that Medicine’s first impulse is to make money. Its second? To torture the patient, kill him if at all possible... Artaud speaks strongly because he is one of those rare Artists who did not bother to fool himself or anybody else. His clarity, his hard brittle lines, his disgust with the Lie, are nothing but the results of a man squeezed to pieces by Life, by the massive horror of the realization that his fellow men, his fellow Artists were, in a sense, only “pigshit.” show less
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Author Information
215+ Works 4,226 Members
An early associate of the surrealists, Antonin Artaud broke with them to form the "theater of cruelty" in 1932. His goal, set forth in his long essay The Theater and Its Double (1938), was to replace the contemporary theater, with its emphasis on psychology, by a theater of myth that would reintroduce the sacred into modern life. Experiments with show more drugs, coupled with a long history of psychiatric trouble, led to Artaud's commitment to a mental hospital for nine years. He remains a contemporary heir to the nineteenth-century antiestablishment poets and an inspiration to contemporary theoreticians of the theater. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1963 (English collection) (English collection)
- People/Characters
- Adolf Hitler (Adolph Hitler)
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Statistics
- Members
- 425
- Popularity
- 72,316
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (4.13)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 2
- ASINs
- 7
