Artaud-The Theatre and Its Double

The Theater
and Its Double
By Antonin Artaud
Translated from the French by

Mary Caroline Richards
_
GROVE PRESS
NEW YORK
Copyright (Q 1958 by Grove Press, Inc.
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CONTENTS
A Note on the Translation 6

7
PREFACE: The Theater and Culture I.
The Theater and the Plague 15
II. Metaphysics and the Mise en Scene III. The 33
Alchemical Theater 48
IV. On the Balinese Theater
53
V. Oriental and Occidental Theater
68
VI. No More Masterpieces VII. 74
The Theater and Cruelty 84
VIII. The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto) . 89
IX. Letters on Cruelty. 101
X. Letters on Language 105
XI. The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto) 122

XII. An Affective Athleticism 133
XIII. Two Notes. 142
MAURICE SAILLET: In Memoriam Antonin Artaud 147
5
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
This translation faithfully follows the text of the Le Theatre et

son Double, published by Gallimard in Collection Meta-
morphoses as No. IV, copyright 1938.
"Esprit," for which we have no English equivalent, combining
as it does both mind and spirit, has in most cases been translated
as "mind," And the expression "mise en scene" has been retained
throughout, for Artaud's use of it implies all that we call
direction, production, and staging.
6
PREFACE: The Theater and Culture
Never before, when it is life itself that is in question, has there

been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a
curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the
root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture
which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been
devised to tyrannize over life.
Before speaking further about culture, I must remark that the
world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and that the
attempt to orient toward culture thoughts turned only toward
hunger is a purely artificial expedient.
What is most important, it seems to me, is not so much to
defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from
going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas
whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.
We need to live first of all; to believe in what makes us live
and that something makes us live-to believe that whatever is
produced from the mysterious depths of ourselves need not
forever haunt us as an exclusively digestive concern.
I mean that if it is important for us to eat first of all, it is even
more important for us not to waste in the sole concern for eating
our simple power of being hungry.
If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this
confusion a rupture between things and words, between things
and the ideas and signs that are their representation.
Not, of course, for lack of philosophical systems; their number
and contradictions characterize our old French and
'1
8 The Theater and Its Double
European culture: but where can it be shown that life, our life,
has ever been affected by these systems? I will not say that
philosophical systems must be applied directly and immediately:
but of the following alternatives, one must be true: .
Either these systems are within us and permeate our being to
the point of supporting life itself (and if this is the case, what use
are books?), or they do not permeate us and therefore do not have
the capacity to support life (and in this case what does their
disappearance matter?).
We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture
growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath; and
on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest
actions, a presence of mind; the distinction between culture and
civilization is an artificial one, providing two words to signify an
identical function.
A civilized man judges and is judged according to his be-
havior, but even the term "civilized" leads to confusion: a
cultivated "civilized" man is regarded as a person instructed in
systems, a person who thinks in forms, signs, representations--a
monster whose faculty of deriving thoughts from acts, instead of
identifying acts with thoughts, is developed to an absurdity.
If our life lacks brimstone, Le., a constant magic, it is because
we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in
considerations of their imagined form instead of being impelled
by their force.
And this faculty is an exclusively human one. I would even
say that it is this infection-of the human which contaminates
ideas that should have remained divine; for far from believing
that man invented the supernatural and the divine, I think it is
man's age-old intervention which has ultimately corrupted the
divine within him.
All our ideas about life must be revised in a period when
nothing any longer adheres to life; it is this painful cleavage
Preface 9
which is responsible for the revenge of things; the poetry which
is no longer within us and which we no longer succeed
in finding in things suddenly appears on their wrong side:
consider the unprecedented number of crimes whose perverse
gratuitousness is explained only by our powerlessness to take
complete possession of life.
If the theater has been created as an outlet for our repressions,
the agonized poetry expressed in its bizarre corruptions of the
facts of life demonstrates that life's intensity is still intact and
asks only to be better directed.
But 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.
Hence our confirmed lack of culture is astonished by certain
grandiose anomalies; for example, on an island without any
contact with modem civilization, the mere passage of a ship
carrying only healthy passengers may provoke the sudden
outbreak of diseases unknown on that island but a specialty of
nations like our own: shingles, influenza, grippe, rheumatism,
sinusitis, polyneuritis, etc.
Similarly, if we think Negroes smell bad, we are ignorant of
the fact that anywhere but in Europe it is we whites who "smell
bad." And I 'would even say that we give off an odor as white as
the gathering of pus in an infected wound.
As iron can be heated until it turns white, so it can be said that
everything excessive is white; for Asiatics white has become the
mark of extreme decomposition.
This said, we can begin to form an idea of culture, an idea

which is first of all a protest.
A protest against the senseless constraint imposed upon the
idea of culture by reducing it to a sort of inconceivable Pantheon,
producing an idolatry no different from the image worship of
those religions which relegate their gods to Pantheons.
A protest against the idea of culture as distinct from life as if
there were culture on one side and life on the other, as if true
culture were not a refined means of understanding and exercising
life.
The library at Alexandria can be burnt down. There are forces
above and beyond papyrus: we may temporarily be deprived of
our ability to discover these forces, but their energy will not be
suppressed. It is good that our excessive facilities are no longer
available, that forms fall into oblivion: a culture without space or
time, restrained only by the capacity of our own nerves, will
reappear with all the more energy. It is right that from time to
time cataclysms occur which compel us to return to nature, i.e., to
rediscover life. The old totemism of animals, stones, objects
capable of discharging thunderbolts, costumes impregnated with
bestial essences-everything, in short, that might determine,
disclose, and direct the secret forces of the universe-is for us a
dead thing, from which we derive nothing but static and aesthetic
profit, the profit of an audience, not of an actor.
Yet totemism is an actor, for it moves, and has been created in
behalf of actors; all true culture relies upon the barbaric and
primitive means of totemism whose savage, i.e., entirely
spontaneous, life I wish to worship.
What has lost us culture is our Occidental idea of art and the
profits we seek to derive from it. Art and culture cannot be
considered together, contrary to the treatment universally
accorded them!
True culture operates by exaltation and force, while the
European ideal of art attempts to cast the mind into an attitude
distinct from force but addicted to exaltation. It is a lazy,
unserviceable notion which engenders an imminent death. If the
Serpent Quetzalcoatl's multiple twists and turns are harmonious,
it is because they express the equilibrium and fluctuations of a
sleeping force; the intensity of the forms is there
Preface 11
only to seduce and direct a force which, in music, would

produce an insupportable range of sound.
The gods that sleep in museums: the god of fire with his
incense burner that resembles an Inquisition tripod; Tlaloc, one of
the manifold Gods of the Waters, on his wall of green granite; the
Mother Goddess of Waters, the Mother Goddess of Flowers; the
immutable expression, echoing from beneath many layers of
water, of the Goddess robed in green jade; the enraptured, blissful
expression, features crackling with incense, where atoms of
sunlight circle--the countenance of the Mother Goddess of
Flowers; this world of obligatory servitude in which a stone
comes alive when it has been properly carved, the world of
organically civilized men whose vital organs too awaken from
their slumber, this human world enters into us, participating in the
dance of the gods without turning round or looking back, on pain
of becoming, like ourselves, crumbled pillars of salt.
In Mexico, since we are talking about Mexico, there is no art:
things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation.
To our disinterested and inert idea of art an authentic culture
opposes a violently egoistic and magical, i.e., interested idea. For
the Mexicans seek contact with the Manas, forces latent in every
form, unreleased by contemplation of the forms for themselves,
but springing to life by magic identification with these forms.
And the old Totems are there to hasten the communication.
How hard it is, when everything encourages us to sleep, though
we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and
yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know
their function and whose gaze is turned inward.
This is how our strange idea of disinterested action originated,
though it is action nonetheless, and all the more violent for
skirting the temptation of repose.
Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art
must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has
liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy
his repose.
Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs,
the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all
arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered
their limitations. From the beginning, one might say its shadows
did not tolerate limitations.
Our petrified idea of the theater is connected with our petrified
idea of a culture without shadows, where, no matter which way it
turns, our mind (esprit) encounters only emptiness, though space
is full.
But the true theater, because it moves and makes use of living
instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never
ceased to grope its way. The actor does not make the same
gestures twice, but he makes gestures, he moves; and although he
brutalizes forms, nevertheless behind them and through their
destruction he rejoins that which outlives forms and produces
their continuation.
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything-
-gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness-rediscovers
itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to
express its manifestations.
And the fixation of the theater in one language--written words,
music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin, the choice of
anyone language betraying a taste for the special effects of that
language; and the dessication of the language accompanies its
limitation.
For the theater as for culture, it remains a question of naming
and directing shadows: and the theater, not confined to a fixed
language and form, not only destroys false shadows but prepares
the way for a new generation of shadows, around which
assembles the true spectacle of life.
Preface 13
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or
recreate the theater; the essential thing is not to believe that this
act must remain sacred, Le., set apart--the essential thing is to
believe that not just anyone can create it, and that there must be a
preparation.
This leads to the rejection of the usual limitations of man and
man's powers, and infinitely extends the frontiers of what is called
reality.
We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a
sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of
what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything
that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not
satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.
Furthermore, when we speak the word "life," it must be
understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its
surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms
never reach. And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing
in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being
like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.
I. The Theater and the Plague
The archives of the little town of Cagliari, in Sardinia, contain the

account of an astonishing historical fact.
One night at the end of April or the beginning of May, 1720,
about twenty days before the arrival at Marseille of the Grand-
Saint-Antoine, a vessel whose landing coincided with the most
amazing outbreak of the plague in that city's memory, Saint-
Remys, the viceroy of Sardinia, whose reduced monarchical
responsibilities had perhaps sensitized him to the
most pernicious of viruses, had a particularly afflicting dream: he
saw himself infected by the plague he dreamed was ravaging the
whole of his tiny state.
Beneath such a scourge, all social forms disintegrate. Order
collapses. He observes every infringement of morality, every
psychological disaster; he hears his body fluids murmuring within
him; tom, failing in a dizzying collapse of tissue, his organs grow
heavy and gradually turn to carbon. But is it too late to avert the
scourge? Even destroyed, even annihilated, organically pulverized
and consumed to his very mar. row, he knows we do not die in our
dreams, that our will operates even in absurdity, even in the
negation of possibility, even in the transmutation of the lies from
which truth can be remade.
He wakes up. All these rumors about the plague, these
15
miasmas of a virus from the Orient:--he will know how to keep
them away now.
The Grand-Saint-Antoine, a month out of Beirut, asks for
permission to dock at Cagliari. The viceroy replies with an insane
order, an order considered irresponsible, absurd, idiotic, and
despotic by the public and by his own staff. He hastily dispatches
the pilot's boat and some men to the ship which he presumes
contaminated, with orders that the Grand-Saint Antoine tack about
immediately and make full sail away from the town, under threat
of being sunk by cannon shot. War against the plague. The
autocrat was not going to waste any time.
The particular strength of the influence which this dream
exerted upon him should be remarked in passing, since it
permitted him, in spite of the sarcasms of the crowd and the
skepticism of his followers, to persevere in the ferocity of his
orders, trespassing because of it not only upon the rights of man,
but upon the simplest respect for human life and upon all sorts of
national or international conventions which, in the face of death,
are no longer relevant.
In any case, the ship continued on its course, landed at
Leghorn, and entered the Marseille roadstead where it was
permitted to unload its cargo.
The, harbor authorities of Marseille have not kept a record of
what happened to its plague-ridden cargo. What became of its
crew is more or less known; those who did not die of the plague
dispersed to different countries.
The Grand-Saint-Antoine did not bring the plague to Marseille.
It was already there. And at a point of particular recrudescence.
But its centers had been successfully localized.
The plague brought by the Grand-Saint-Antoine was the
Oriental plague, the original virus, and it is from its approach and
diffusion in the city that the particularly dreadful and widespread
flaring up of the epidemic dates.
This inspires certain thoughts.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 17
This plague, which seems to reactivate a virus, was of itself
capable of inflicting equally virulent damage: of all the crew, the
captain alone did not catch the plague; furthermore, it does not
appear that the newly arrived victims had ever been in direct
contact with the others, confined as they were to close quarters.
The Grand-Saint-Antoine, which passes within shouting range of
Cagliari, in Sardinia, does not deposit the plague there, but the
viceroy gathers certain emanations from it in a dream; for it
cannot be denied that between the viceroy and the plague a
palpable communication, however subtle,
was established: and it is too easy and explains nothing to
limit the communication of such a disease to contagion by simple
contact.
But these relations between Saint-Remys and the plague,
strong enough to liberate themselves as images in his dream, are
all the same not strong enough to infect him with the disease.
In any case the town of Cagliari, learning some time later that
the ship turned from its shores by the despotic will of its viceroy,
its miraculously enlightened viceroy, was at the source of the
great epidemic of Marseille, recorded the fact into its archives,
where it can be found today.
The plague of 1720 in Marseille has yielded us the only so-

called clinical descriptions of the scourge that we possess.
Yet one wonders if the plague described by the Marseille
doctors was indeed the same as that of 1347 in Florence which
produced the Decameron. History, sacred books, among them the
Bible, certain old medical treatises describe externally all sorts of
plagues concerning which they seem to have paid much less
attention to morbid symptoms than to the demoralizing and
prodigious effect produced on the victims' minds. They were
probably right in doing so. For medicine would have considerable
trouble establishing a basic difference between the virus of which
Pericles died before Syracuse, sup
posing the word "virus" to be something other than a mere verbal
convenience, and that which manifests its presence in the plague
described by Hippocrates, which recent medical treatises regard
as a kind of pseudoplague. According to these same treatises, the
only authentic plague is the plague from Egypt which rises from
the cemeteries uncovered when the Nile recedes. The Bible and
Herodotus both call attention to the lightning-like appearance of
the plague which in one night decimated the 180,000 men of the
Assyrian army, thereby saving the Egyptian empire. If the fact is
true, we should have to consider the scourge as the direct
instrument or materialization of an intelligent force in close
contact with what we call fatality.
And this with or without the army of rats which that same
night threw itself upon the Assyrian troops, whose leather armor
and harness they gnawed to pieces in a few hours. The fact is
comparable to the epidemic which broke out in 660 B.C. in the
holy city of Mekao, Japan, on the occasion of a mere change of
government.
The plague of 1502 in Provence, which - furnished Nostra-
damus his first opportunities to exercise his powers as a healer,
coincided with the most profound political upheavals, downfalls
or deaths of kings, disappearance and destruction of provinces,
earthquakes, magnetic phenomena of all kinds, exoduses of Jews,
which precede or follow, in the political or cosmic order,
cataclysms and devastations whose effects those who provoke
them are too stupid to foresee and not perverse enough actually to
desire.
Whatever may be the errors of historians or physicians con-
cerning the plague, I believe we can agree upon the idea of a
malady that would be a kind of psychic entity and would not be
carried by a virus. If one wished to analyze closely all the facts of
plague contagion that history or even memoirs provide us with, it
would be difficult to isolate one actually verified instance of
contagion by contact, and Boccaccio's
ANTONIN ARTAUD 19
example of swine that died from having sniffed the sheets in
which plague victims had been wrapped scarcely suggests more
than a kind of mysterious affinity between pig and the nature of
the plague, which again would have to be very closely analyzed.
Although there exists no concept of an actual morbid entity,
there are some forms upon which the mind can provisionally
agree as characterizing certain phenomena, and it seems that the
mind can agree to a plague described in the following manner.
Before the onset of any very marked physical or psychological
discomfort, the body is covered with red spots, which the victim
suddenly notices only when they turn blackish. The victim
scarcely hesitates to become alarmed before his head begins to
boil and to grow overpoweringly heavy, and he collapses. Then
he is seized by a terrible fatigue, the fatigue of a centralized
magnetic suction, of his molecules divided and drawn toward
their annihilation. His crazed body fluids, unsettled and
commingled, seem to be flooding through his flesh. His gorge
rises, the inside of his stomach seems as if it were trying to gush
out between his teeth. His pulse, which at times slows down to a
shadow of itself, a mere virtuality of a pulse, at others races after
the boiling of the fever within, consonant with the streaming
aberration of his mind, beating in hurried strokes like his heart,
which grows intense, heavy, loud; his eyes, first inflamed, then
glazed; his swollen gasping tongue,
first white, then red, then black, as if charred and split--every-
thing proclaims an unprecedented organic upheaval. Soon the
body fluids, furrowed like the earth struck by lightning, like lava
kneaded by subterranean forces, search for an outlet. The fieriest
point is formed at the center of each spot; around these points the
skin rises in blisters like air bubbles under the surface of lava,
and these blisters are surrounded by circles, of which the
outermost, like Saturn's ring around the incandescent planet,
indicates the extreme limit of a bubo.
The body is furrowed with them. But just as volcanoes have
their elected spots upon the earth, so bubos make their preferred
appearances on the surface of the human body. Around the anus,
in the armpits, in the precious places where the active glands
faithfully perform their functions, the bubos appear, wherever the
organism discharges either its internal rottenness or, according to
the case, its life. In most cases a violent burning sensation,
localized in one spot, indicates that the organism's life has lost
nothing of its force and that a remission of the disease or even its
cure is possible. Like silent rage, the most terrible plague is the
one that does not reveal its symptoms.
The corpse of a plague victim shows no lesions when opened.
The gall bladder, which must filter the heavy and inert wastes of
the organism, is full, swollen to bursting with a black, viscous
fluid so dense as to suggest a new form of matter altogether. The
blood in the arteries and the veins is also black and viscous. The
flesh is hard as stone. On the inner surfaces of the stomach
membrane, innumerable spurts of blood seem to have appeared.
Everything indicates a fundamental disorder in the secretions. But
there is neither loss nor destruction of matter, as in leprosy or
syphilis. The intestines themselves, which are the site of the
bloodiest disorders of all, and in which substances attain an
unheard-of degree of putrefaction and petrifaction, are not
organically affected. The gall bladder, from which the hardened
pus must be virtually tom, as in certain human sacrifices, with a
sharp knife, a hard, vitreous instrument of obsidian--the gall
bladder is hypertrophied and cracking in places but intact,
without any parts missing, without visible lesion, without loss of
substance.
In certain cases, however, the injured lungs and brain blacken
and grow gangrenous. The softened and pitted lungs fall into
chips of some unknown black substance--the brain melts, shrinks,
granulates to a sort of coal-black dust.
Two important observations can be made about this fact.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 21
The first is that the plague syndrome is complete without
gangrene of the lungs and brain, the victim dying without the
putrefaction of any member at all. Without underestimating the
nature of the disease, we can say that the organism does not
require the presence of a localized physical gangrene to determine
its own death.
The second observation is that the only two organs really
affected and injured by the plague, the brain and the lungs, are
both directly dependent upon the consciousness and the will. We
can keep ourselves from breathing or from thinking, can speed up
our respiration, give it any rhythm we choose, make it conscious
or unconscious at will, introduce a balance between two kinds of
breathing: the automatic, which is under the direct control of the
sympathetic nervous system, and the other, which is subject to
those reflexes of the brain which have once again become
conscious.
We can similarly accelerate, retard, and give an arbitrary
rhythm to our thinking--can regulate the unconscious play of the
mind. We cannot control the filtering of body fluids by the liver
or the redistribution of blood by the heart and arteries, cannot
restrain the digestion, arrest or accelerate the elimination of
matter from the intestine. Thus the plague
seems to manifest its presence in and have a preference for the
very organs of the body, the particular physical sites, where
human will, consciousness, and thought are imminent and apt to
occur.
In 1880 or so, a French doctor by the name of Yersin, working

on some cadavers of Indo-Chinese natives who had died of the
plague, isolated one of those round-headed, short-tailed tadpoles
which only the microscope can reveal and called it the plague
microbe. Personally, I regard this microbe only as a smaller--
infinitely smaller--material element which appears at some
moment in the development of the virus, but which in no way
accounts for the plague. And I should like
this doctor to tell me why all the great plagues, with or without
virus, have a duration of five months, after which their virulence
abates, and how the Turkish ambassador who was passing
through Languedoc towards the end of 1720 was able to draw an
imaginary line from Nice through Avignon and Toulouse to
Bordeaux, marking the limit of the scourge's geographical extent-
-a line which events proved to be accurate.
From all this emerges the spiritual physiognomy of a disease
whose laws cannot be precisely defined and whose geographical
origin it would be idiotic to attempt to determine, for the Egyptian
plague is not the Oriental plague, which is not that described by
Hippocrates, which is not that of Syracuse, nor of Florence, nor
the Black Death which accounted for fifty million lives in
medieval Europe. No one can say why the plague strikes the
coward who flees it and spares the degenerate who gratifies
himself on the corpses. Why distance, chastity, solitude are
helpless against the attacks of the scourge; and why a group of
debauchees isolating themselves in the country, like Boccaccio
with his two well-stocked companions and seven women as
lustful as they were religious, can calmly wait for the warm days
when the plague withdraws; and why in a nearby castle
transformed into a citadel with a cordon of armed men to forbid
all entree, the plague turns the garrison and all the occupants into
corpses and spares only the armed men exposed to contagion.
Who can also explain why the military cordons sanitaires which
Mehmet
Ali established toward the end of the last century, on the occasion
of an outbreak of the Egyptian plague, effectively protected
convents, schools, prisons, and palaces; and why numerous
epidemics of a plague with all the characteristic symptoms of
Oriental plague could suddenly break out in medieval Europe in
places having no contact whatever with the Orient.
From these peculiarities, these mysteries. these contradictions
ANTONIN ARTAUD 23
and these symptoms we must construct the spiritual physiognomy
of a disease which progressively destroys the organism like a pain
which, as it intensifies and deepens, multiplies its resources and
means of access at every level of the sensibility .
But from this spiritual freedom with which the plague
develops, without rats, without microbes, and without contact,
can be deduced the somber and absolute action of a spectacle
which I shall attempt to analyze.
Once the plague is established in a city, the regular forms
collapse. There is no maintenance of roads and sewers, no army,
no police, no municipal administration. Pyres are lit at random to
bum the dead, with whatever means are available. Each family
wants to have its own. Then wood, space, and flame itself
growing rare, there are family feuds around the pyres, soon
followed by a general flight, for the corpses are too numerous.
The dead already clog .the streets in ragged pyramids gnawed at
by animals around the edges. The stench rises in the air like a
flame. Entire streets are blocked by the piles of dead. Then the
houses open and the delirious victims, their minds crowded with
hideous visions, spread howling through the streets. The disease
that ferments in their viscera and circulates throughout their entire
organism discharges itself in tremendous cerebral explosions.
Other victims, without bubos, delirium, pain, or rash, examine
themselves proudly in the mirror, in splendid health, as they
think, and then fall dead with their shaving mugs in their hands,
full of scorn for other victims.
Over the poisonous, thick, bloody streams (color of agony and
opium) which gush out of the corpses, strange personages pass,
dressed in wax, with noses long as sausages and eyes of glass,
mounted on a kind of Japanese sandal made of double wooden
tablets, one horizontal, in the form of a sole, the other vertical, to
keep them from the contaminated fluids, chanting
absurd litanies that cannot prevent them from sinking into the
furnace in their turn. These ignorant doctors betray only their fear
and their childishness.
The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their
frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know
will serve no purpose or profit. And at that moment the theater is
born. The theater, i.e., an immediate gratuitousness provoking acts
without use or profit.
The last of the living are in a frenzy: the obedient and virtuous
son kills his father; the chaste man performs sodomy upon his
neighbors. The lecher becomes pure. The miser throws his gold in
handfuls out the window. The warrior hero sets fire to the city he
once risked his life to save. The dandy decks himself out in his
finest clothes and promenades before the charnel houses. Neither
the idea of an absence of sanctions nor that of imminent death
suffices to motivate acts so gratuitously absurd on the part of men
who did not believe death could end anything. And how explain
the surge of erotic fever among the recovered victims who,
instead of fleeing the city,
remain where they are, trying to wrench a criminal pleasure from
the dying or even the dead, half crushed under the pile of corpses
where chance has lodged them.
But if a mighty scourge is required to make this frenetic
gratuitousness show itself, and if this scourge is called the
plague, then perhaps we can determine the value of this gra-
tuitousness in relation to our total personality. The state of the
victim who dies without material destruction, with all the
stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him, is
identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings
that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition. Everything
in the physical aspect of the actor, as in that of the victim of the
plague, shows that life has reacted to the paroxysm, and yet
nothing has happened.
Between the victim of the plague who runs in shrieking pursuit
of his visions and the actor in pursuit of his feelings;
ANTONIN ARTAUD 25
between the man who invents for himself personages he could
never have imagined without the plague, creating them in the
midst of an audience of corpses and delirious lunatics and the
poet who inopportunely invents characters, entrusting them to a
public equally inert or delirious, there are other analogies which
confirm the only truths that count and locate the action of the
theater like that of the plague on the level of a veritable epidemic.
But whereas the images of the plague, occurring in relation to a
powerful state of physical disorganization, are like the last volleys
of a spiritual force that is exhausting itself, the images of poetry
in the theater are a spiritual force that begins its trajectory in the
senses and does without reality altogether. Once launched upon
the fury of his task, an actor requires infinitely more power to
keep from committing a crime than a murderer needs courage to
complete his act, and it is here, in its very gratuitousness, that the
action and effect of a feeling in the theater appears infinitely more
valid than that of a feeling fulfilled in life.
Compared with the murderer's fury which exhausts itself, that
of the tragic actor remains enclosed within a perfect circle. The
murderer's fury has accomplished an act, discharges itself, and
loses contact with the force that inspired it but can no longer
sustain it. That of the actor has taken' a form that negates itself to
just the degree it frees itself and dissolves into universality.
Extending this spiritual image of the plague, we can com-
prehend the troubled body fluids of the victim as the material
aspect of a disorder which, in other contexts, is equivalent to the
conflicts, struggles, cataclysms and debacles our lives afford us.
And just as it is not impossible that the unavailing despair of the
lunatic screaming in an asylum can cause the plague by a sort of
reversibility of feelings and images, one can similarly admit that
the external events, political conflicts, natural cataclysms, the
order of revolution and the disorder of
war, by occurring in the context of the theater, discharge
themselves into the sensibility of an audience with all the force of
an epidemic.
In The City of God St. Augustine complains of this similarity
between the action of the plague that kills without destroying the
organs and the theater which, without killing, provokes the most
mysterious alterations in the mind of not only an individual but an
entire populace.
"Know," he says, "you who are ignorant, that these plays,
sinful spectacles, were not established in Rome by the vices of
men but by the order of your gods. It would be more reasonable
to render divine honors unto Scipio* than to such gods; surely,
they are not worthy of their pontiff! . . .
"In order to appease the plague that killed bodies, your gods
commanded in their honor these plays, and your pontiff, wishing
to avoid this plague that corrupts souls, opposes the construction
of the stage itself. If there still remains among you sufficient trace
of intelligence to prefer the soul to the body, choose what
deserves your reverence; for the strategy of the evil Spirits,
foreseeing that the contagion would end with the body, seized
joyfully upon this occasion to introduce a much more dangerous
scourge among you, one that attacks not bodies but customs. In
fact, such is the blindness, such the corruption produced in the
soul by plays that even in these late times those whom this fatal
passion possessed, who had escaped from the sack of Rome and
taken refuge in Carthage, passed each day at the theater priding
themselves on their delirious enthusiasm for the actors."
It is useless to give precise reasons for this contagious delir-
ium. It would be like trying to find reasons why our nervous
system after a certain period responds to the vibrations of the
subtlest music and is eventually somehow modified by them
*1 Scipio Nasica, grand pontiff, who ordered the theaters of Rome to be

leveled and their cellars filled with earth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 27
in a lasting way. First of all we must recognize that the theater,
like the plague, is a delirium and is communicative.
The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes: that
is the secret of the fascination. Nor does Saint Augustine's text
question for one moment the reality of this fascination.
However, there are conditions to be rediscovered in order to
engender in the mind a spectacle capable of fascinating it: and
this is not a simple matter of art.
For if the theater is like the plague, it is not only because it
affects important collectivities and upsets them in an identical
way. In the theater as in the plague there is something both
victorious and vengeful: we are aware that the spontaneous
conflagration which the plague lights wherever it passes is
nothing else than an immense liquidation.
A social disaster so far-reaching, an organic disorder so
mysterious--this overflow of vices, this total exorcism which
presses and impels the soul to its utmost--all indicate the presence
of a state which is nevertheless characterized by extreme strength
and in which all the powers of nature are freshly discovered at the
moment when something essential is going to be accomplished.
The plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder,
and suddenly extends them into the most extreme gestures; the
theater also takes gestures and pushes them as far as they will go:
like the plague it reforges the chain between what is and what is
not, between the virtuality of the possible and what already exists
in materialized nature. It recovers the notion of symbols and
archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart,
summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our
abruptly wakened heads. The theater restores us as our dormant
conflicts and all their powers, and gives these powers names we
hail as symbols: and behold! before our eyes is fought a battle of
symbols, one charging against another in an impossible melee;
for there can be
theater only from the moment when the impossible really begins
and when the poetry which occurs on the stage sustains and
superheats the realized symbols.
These symbols, the sign of ripe powers previously held in
servitude and unavailable to reality, burst forth in the guise of
incredible images which give freedom of the city and of existence
to acts that are by nature hostile to the life of societies.
In the true theater a play disturbs the senses' repose, frees
the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt (which
moreover can have its full effect only if it remains virtual), and
imposes on the assembled collectivity an attitude that is both
difficult and heroic.
Thus in Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, from the moment the
curtain rises, we see to our utter stupefaction a creature flung into
an insolent vindication of incest, exerting all the vigor of his
youthful consciousness to proclaim and justify it.
He does not waver an instant, does not hesitate a minute, and
thereby shows of how little account are all the barriers that could
be opposed to him. He is heroically criminal and audaciously,
ostentatiously heroic. Everything drives him in this direction and
inflames his enthusiasm; he recognizes neither earth nor heaven,
only the force of his convulsive passion, to which the rebellious
and equally heroic passion of Annabella does not fail to respond.
"I weep," she says, "not with remorse but for fear I shall not be
able to satisfy my passion." They are both forgers, hypocrites, and
liars for the sake of their superhuman passion which laws obstruct
and condemn but which they will put beyond the law.
Vengeance for vengeance, and crime for crime. When we
believe them threatened, hunted down, lost, when we are ready to
pity them as victims, then they reveal themselves ready to render
destiny threat for threat and blow for blow.
With them we proceed from excess to excess and vindication
to vindication. Annabella is captured, convicted of adultery
ANTONIN ARTAUD 29
and incest, trampled upon, insulted, dragged by the hair, and we
are astonished to discover that far from seeking a means of
escape, she provokes her executioner still further
and sings out in a kind of obstinate heroism. It is the absolute
condition of revolt, it is an exemplary case of love without respite
which makes us, the spectators, gasp with anguish at the idea that
nothing will ever be able to stop it.
If we desire an example of absolute freedom in revolt, Ford's
Annabella provides this poetic example bound up with the image
of absolute danger.
And when we tell ourselves we have reached the paroxysm of
horror, blood, and flouted laws, of poetry which consecrates
revolt, we are obliged to advance still further into an endless
vertigo.
But ultimately, we tell ourselves, there is vengeance, there is
death for such audacity and such irresistible crime.
But there is no such thing. Giovanni, the lover, inspired by the
passion of a great poet, puts himself beyond vengeance, beyond
crime, by still another crime, one that is indescribably
passionate; beyond threats, beyond horror by an even greater
horror, one which overthrows at one and the same time law,
morality, and all those who dare set themselves up as admin-
istrators of justice.
A trap is cleverly set, a great banquet is given where, among
the guests, hired ruffians and spies are to be hidden, ready at the
first signal to throw themselves upon him. But this hero, cornered,
lost, and inspired by love, will let no one pass sentence on this
love.
You want, he seems to say, my love's flesh and blood. Very
well, I will throw this love in your face and shower you with its
blood--for you are incapable of rising to its height!
And he kills his beloved and tears out her heart as if to feast
upon it in the middle of a banquet where he himself is the one
whom the guests had hoped to devour.
And before being executed, he manages to kill his rival,
his sister's husband, who has dared to come between him and his
love, and despatches him in a final combat which then appears as
his own spasm of agony.
. Like the plague, the theater is a formidable call to the forces

that impel the mind by example to the source of its conflicts. And
it is evident that Ford's passional example merely symbolizes a
still greater and absolutely essential task.
The terrorizing apparition of Evil which in the Mysteries of
Eleusis was produced in its pure, truly revealed form corresponds
to the dark hour of certain ancient tragedies which all true theater
must recover.
If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is
contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the
bringing forth, the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by
means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether
of an individual or a people, are localized.
Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of
dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound
until extinction.
In the theater as in the plague there is a kind of strange sun, a
light of abnormal intensity by which it seems that the difficult and
even the impossible suddenly become our normal element. And
Ford's play, like all true theater, is within the radiance of this
strange sun. His Annabella resembles the plague's freedom by
means of which, from degree to degree, stage to stage, the victim
swells his individuality and the survivor gradually becomes a
grandiose and overwhelming being.
We can now say that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly
identified with sexual freedom which is also dark, although we do
not know precisely why. For it has been a long time since the
Platonic Eros, the procreative sense, the freedom of life vanished
beneath the somber veneer of the Libido which is identified with
all that is dirty, abject, infamous in the process of living and of
throwing oneself headlong with a
ANTONIN ARTAUD 31
natural and impure vigor, with a perpetually renewed strength,
upon life.
And that is why all the great Myths are dark, so that one
cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and
bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the
multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of
essences that appeared in creation.
The theater, like the plague, is in the image of this carnage and
this essential separation. It releases conflicts, disengages powers,
liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers
are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theater, but of
life.
We do not see that life as it is and as it has been fashioned for
us provides many reasons for exaltation. It appears that by means
of the plague, a gigantic abscess, as much moral as social, has
been collectively drained; and that like the plague, the theater has
been created to drain abscesses collectively.
Perhaps the theater's poison, injected into the social body,
disintegrates it, as Saint Augustine says, but at least it does so as
a plague, as an avenging scourge, a redeeming epidemic in which
credulous ages have chosen to see the finger of God and which is
nothing but the application of a law of nature whereby every
gesture is counterbalanced by a gesture and every action by its
reaction.
The theater like the plague is a crisis which is resolved by
death or cure. And the plague is a superior disease because it is a
total crisis after which nothing remains except death or an
extreme purification. Similarly the theater is a disease because it
is the supreme equilibrium which cannot be achieved without
destruction. It invites the mind to share a delirium
which exalts its energies; and we can see, to conclude, that from
the human point of view, the action of theater, like that of
plague, is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as
they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the
slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; it shakes off
the asphyxiating inertia of matter which invades even the clearest
testimony of the senses; and in revealing to collectivities of men
their dark power, their hidden force, it invites them to take, in the
face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never
have assumed without it.
And the question we must now ask is whether, in this slippery
world which is committing suicide without noticing it, there can
be found a nucleus of men capable of imposing this superior
notion of the theater, men who will restore to all of us the natural
and magic equivalent of the dogmas in which we no longer
believe.
II. Metaphysics and the Mise en Scene
In the Louvre there is a work by a primitive painter, known or

unknown I cannot say, but whose name will never be re-
presentative of an important period in the history of art. This
painter is Lucas van den Leyden and in my opinion he makes the
four or five centuries of painting that come after him inane and
useless. The canvas I speak of is entitled "The Daughters of Lot,"
a biblical subject in the style of the period. Of course the Bible in
the Middle Ages was not understood in the same way we
understand it today, and this canvas is a curious example of the
mystic deductions that can be derived from it. Its emotion, in any
case, is visible even from a distance; it affects the mind with an
almost thunderous visual harmony, intensely active throughout
the painting, yet to be gathered from a single glance. Even before
you can discern what is going on, you sense something
tremendous happening in the painting, and the ear, one would say,
is as moved by it as the eye. A drama of high intellectual
importance seems massed there like a sudden gathering of clouds
which the wind or some much more direct fatality has impelled
together to measure their thunderbolts.
The sky of the picture, in fact, is black and swollen; but even
before we can tell that the drama was born in the sky, was
happening in the sky, the peculiar lighting of the canvas, the
jumble of shapes, the impression the whole gives at a distance--
33
everything betokens a kind of drama of nature for which I defy
any painter of the Great Periods to give us an equivalent.
A tent is pitched at the sea's edge, in front of which Lot is
sitting, wearing full armor and a handsome red beard, watching his
daughters parade up and down as if he were a guest at a
prostitutes' banquet.
And in fact they are strutting about, some as mothers of
families, others as amazons, combing their hair and fencing, as if
they had never had any other purpose than to charm their father, to
be his plaything or his instrument. We are thus presented with the
profoundly incestuous character of the old theme which the painter
develops here in passionate images. Its profound sexuality is proof
that the painter has understood his subject absolutely as a modern
man, that is, as we ourselves would understand it: proof that its
character of profound but poetic sexuality has escaped him no
more than it has eluded us.
On the left of the picture, and a little to the rear, a black tower
rises to prodigious heights, supported at its base by a whole
system of rocks, plants, zigzagging roads marked with milestones
and dotted here and there with houses. And by a happy effect of
perspective, one of these roads at a certain point disengages itself
from the maze through which it has been creeping, crosses a
bridge, and at last receives a ray of that stormy light which brims
over between the clouds and showers the region irregularly.
The sea in the background of the canvas is extremely high, at the
same time extremely calm considering the fiery skein that is
boiling up in one corner of the sky.
It happens that when we are watching fireworks, the crackling
nocturnal bombardment of shooting stars, sky rockets, and Roman
candles may reveal to our eyes in its hallucinatory light certain
details of landscape, wrought in relief against the
ANTONIN ARTAUD 35
night: trees, towers, mountains, houses, whose lighting and sudden
apparition will always remain definitely linked in our minds with
the idea of this noisy rending of the darkness. There is no better
way of expressing this submission of the different elements of
landscape to the fire revealed in the sky of this painting than by
saying that even though they possess their own light, they remain
in spite of everything related to this sudden fire as dim echoes,
living points of reference born from it and placed where they are
to permit it to exercise its full destructive force.
There is moreover something frighteningly energetic and
troubling in the way the painter depicts this fire, like an element
still active and in motion, yet with an immobilized expression. It
matters little how this effect is obtained, it is real; it is enough to
see the canvas to be convinced of it.
In any case, this fire, which no one will deny produces an
impression of intelligence and malice, serves, by its very violence,
as a counterbalance in the mind to the heavy material stability of
the rest of the painting.
Between the sea and the sky, but towards the right, and on the
same level in perspective as the Black Tower, projects a thin spit
of land crowned by a monastery in ruins.
This spit of land, so close that it is visible from the shore where
Lot's tent stands, reveals behind it an immense gulf in
which an unprecedented naval disaster seems to have occurred.
Vessels cut in two and not yet sunk lean upon the sea as upon
crutches, strewing everywhere their uprooted masts and spars.
It would be difficult to say why the impression of disaster,
which is created by the sight of only one or two ships in pieces, is
so complete.
It seems as if the painter possessed certain secrets of linear
harmony, certain means of making that harmony affect the brain
directly, like a physical agent. In any case this impression of
intelligence prevailing in external nature and especially
in the manner of its representation is apparent in several other
details of the canvas, witness for example the bridge as high as an
eight-story house standing out against the sea, across which
people are filing, one after another, like Ideas in Plato's cave.
It would be untrue to claim that the ideas which emerge from
this picture are clear. They are however of a grandeur that
painting which is merely painting, i.e., all painting for several
centuries, has completely abandoned: we are not accustomed to it.
In addition, Lot and his daughters suggest an idea concerning
sexuality and reproduction, for Lot is seemingly placed
there among his daughters to profit unfairly by them, like a drone.
It is almost the only social idea that the painting contains.
All the other ideas are metaphysical. I am sorry to use
this word, but it is their name; and I shall even say that their
poetic grandeur, their concrete efficacity upon us, is a result of
their being metaphysical; their spiritual profundity is in
separable from the formal and exterior harmony of the picture.
There is, again, an idea of Becoming which the various details
of the landscape and the way they are painted-the way their
planes and perspectives are blotted out or made to correspond-
introduce into our minds with precisely the effect of a piece of
music.
There is another idea, of Fatality, expressed less by the sudden
apparition of this fire, than by the solemn way in which all the
forms are organized or disorganized beneath it, some as if bent
under a wind of irresistible panic, others immobile
and almost ironic, all obeying a powerful intellectual harmony,
which seems to be the exteriorization of the very spirit of nature.
And there is an idea of Chaos, an idea of the Marvelous, an
idea of Equilibrium; there are even one or two concerning the
ANTONIN ARTAUD 37
impotence of Speech whose uselessness this supremely material
and anarchic painting seems to demonstrate.
I say in any case that this painting is what the theater should
be, if it knew how to speak the language that belongs to it.
And I ask this question:
How does it happen that in the theater, at least in the
theater as we know it in Europe, or better in the Occident,
everything specifically theatrical, i.e., everything that cannot be
expressed in speech, in words, or, if you prefer, everything that is
not contained in the dialogue (and the dialogue itself considered
as a function of its possibilities for "sound" on the stage, as a
function of the exigencies of this sonorisation) is left in the
background?
How does it happen, moreover, that the Occidental theater (I
say Occidental because there are fortunately others, like the
Oriental theater, which have preserved intact the idea of theater,
while in the Occident this idea-like all the rest has been
prostituted), how does it happen that the Occidental theater does
not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of
dialogue?
Dialogue-a thing written and spoken-does not belong
specifically to the stage, it belongs to books, as is proved by the
fact that in all handbooks of literary history a place is reserved for
the theater as a subordinate branch of the history of the spoken
language.
I say that the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to
be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak.
I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and
independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is
a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that
this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical
only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the
reach of the spoken language.
I will be asked what these thoughts are which words cannot
express and which, far more than words, would find their ideal
expression in the concrete physical language of the stage.
I will answer this question a little later.
What is essential now, it seems to me, is to determine what
this physical language consists of, this solidified, materialized
language by means of which theater is able to differentiate itself
from speech.
It consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that
can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is
addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed
primarily to the mind as is the language of words. (I am well
aware that words too have possibilities as sound, different ways of
being projected into space, which are called intonations.
Furthermore, there would be a great deal to say about the concrete
value of intonation in the theater, about this faculty words have of
creating a music in their own right according to the way they are
pronounced, independently of their concrete meaning and even
going counter to this meaning--of creating beneath language a
subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and
analogies; but this theatrical consideration of language is already a
subordinate aspect of language for the playwright, an accessory
consideration of which, especially in our time, he takes no account
in the construction of his plays. So let us pass on.)
This language created for the senses must from the outset be
concerned with satisfying them. This does not prevent it from
developing later its full intellectual effect on all possible levels
and in every direction. But it permits the substitution, for the
poetry of language, of a poetry in space which will be
resolved in precisely the domain which does not belong strictly to
words.
Doubtless you would prefer, for a better understanding of what
I mean, a few examples of this poetry in space capable
ANTONIN ARTAUD 39
of creating kinds of material images equivalent to word images.
You will find these examples a little further on.
This very difficult and complex poetry assumes many aspects:
especially the aspects of all the means of expression utilizable on
the stage,1 such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry,
gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery.
Each of these means has its own intrinsic poetry, and a
kind of ironic poetry as well, resulting from the way it combines
with the other means of expression; and the consequences of these
combinations, of their reactions and their reciprocal destructions,
are easy to perceive.
I shall return a little later to this poetry which can be fully
effective only if it is concrete, Le., only if it produces something
objectively from the fact of its active presence on the stage;--only
if a sound, as in the Balinese theater, has its equivalent in a
gesture and, instead of serving as a decoration, an
accompaniment of a thought, instead causes its movement,
directs it, destroys it, or changes it completely, etc.
One form of this poetry in space-besides the one that can be
created by combinations of lines, shapes, colors, objects in their
natural state, such as one finds in all the arts
belongs to sign-language. I hope I shall be allowed to speak for a
moment about this other aspect of pure theatrical language which
does without words, a language of signs, gestures and attitudes
having an ideographic value as they exist in certain unperverted
pantomimes.
By "unperverted pantomime" I mean direct Pantomime where
gestures-instead of representing words or sentences,
1 To the degree that they prove capable of profiting from the immediate
physical possibilities the stage offers them in order to substitute, for fixed
forms of art, living and intimidating forms by which the sense of old
ceremonial magic can find a new reality in the theater; to the degree that they
yield to what might be called the physical temptation of the stage.
as in our European Pantomime (a mere fifty years old!)
which is merely a distortion of the mute roles of Italian comedy-
represent ideas, attitudes of mind, aspects of nature, all in an
effective, concrete manner, Le., by constantly evoking objects or
natural details, like that Oriental language which represents night
by a tree on which a bird that has already closed one eye is
beginning to close the other. Another such abstract idea or attitude
of mind could be represented by some of the innumerable
symbols from Scripture, as the needle's eye through which the
camel cannot pass.
It is plain that these signs constitute true hieroglyphs, in which
man, to the extent that he contributes to their formation, is only a
form like the rest, yet to which, because of his double nature, he
adds a singular prestige.
This language which evokes in the mind images of an intense
natural (or spiritual) poetry provides a good idea of what a poetry
in space independent of spoken language could mean in the
theater.
Whatever the case of this language and its poetry may be, I
have noticed that in our theater which lives under the exclusive
dictatorship of speech, this language of gesture and mime, this
wordless pantomime, these postures, attitudes, objective
intonations, in brief everything I consider specifically theatrical in
the theater, all these elements when they exist apart from text are
generally considered the minor part of theater; they are
negligently referred to as "craft," and identified with what is
understood by staging or "production," and can consider
themselves fortunate if the words mise en scene are not applied to
the idea of artistic and external sumptuousness pertaining
exclusively to costumes, lighting, and set.
And in opposition to this way of looking at things, a way
which seems to me entirely Occidental or rather Latin, i.e.,
pigheaded, I shall say that to the degree that this language derives
from the stage, draws its efficacity from its spontaneous creation
on the stage, to the degree that it struggles
ANTONIN ARTAUD 41
directly with the stage without passing through words (and why
not conceive of a play composed directly on the stage, realized on
the stage )-it is the mise en scene that is the theater much more
than the written and spoken play. I will be asked no doubt to
define what is Latin in this way of seeing opposed to mine. What
is Latin is this need to use words to express ideas that are
obvious. For to me obvious ideas are, in the theater as everywhere
else, dead and done with.
The idea of a play made directly in terms of the stage, en-
countering obstacles of both production and performance,
compels the discovery of an active language, active and anarchic,
a language in which the customary limits of feelings and words
are transcended.
In any case, and I hasten to say it at once, a theater which
subordinates the mise en scene and production, i.e., everything in
itself that is specifically theatrical, to the text, is a theater of
idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets and
positivists, i.e., Occidentals.
Furthermore, I am well aware that the language of gestures and
postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a
character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of
consciousness clearly and precisely than is verbal language, but
who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to
resolve the conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the
problems of a topical and psychological nature that monopolize
our contemporary stage?
Given the theater as we see it here, one would say there is
nothing more to life than knowing whether we can make love
skillfully, whether we will go to war or are cowardly enough to
make peace, how we cope with our little pangs of conscience, and
whether we will become conscious of our "complexes" (in the
language of experts) or if indeed our "complexes" will do us in.
Rarely, moreover, does the debate rise to a social level, rarely do
we question our social and moral system. Our theater never goes
so far as to ask whether
this social and moral system might not by chance be iniquitous.
I believe, however, that our present social state is iniquitous
and should be destroyed. If this is a fact for the theater to be
preoccupied with, it is even more a matter for machine guns. Our
theater is not even capable of asking the question in the burning
and effective way it must be asked, but even if it should ask this
question it would still be far from its purpose, 'which is for me a
higher and more secret one.
All the preoccupations enumerated above stink unbelievably of
man, provisional, material man, I shall even say carrion man.
Such preoccupation with personal problems disgusts me, and
disgusts me all the more with nearly the whole contemporary
theater which, as human as it is antipoetic, except for three or four
plays, seems to me to stink of decadence and pus.
The contemporary theater is decadent because it has lost the

feeling on the one hand for seriousness and on the other for
laughter; because it has broken away from gravity, from effects
that are immediate and painful-in a word, from Danger.
Because it has lost a sense of real humor, a sense of laughter's
power of physical and anarchic dissociation.
Because it has broken away from the spirit of profound
anarchy which is at the root of all poetry.
It must be admitted that everything in the destination of an
object, in the meaning or the use of a natural form, is a matter of
convention.
Nature, in giving a tree the form of a tree, could just as well
have given it the form of an animal or of a hill; we would have
thought tree for the animal or the hill, and the trick would have
been turned.
It is agreed that a beautiful woman has a melodious voice; if,
since the world began, we had heard all beautiful women
ANTONIN ARTAUD 43
call to us in trumpet blasts and greet us like bellowing elephants,
we would have eternally associated the idea of bellowing with the
idea of a beautiful woman, and a portion of our inner vision of the
world would have been radically transformed thereby.
This helps us to understand that poetry is anarchic to the degree
that it brings into play all the relationships of object to object and
of form to signification. It is anarchic also to the degree that its
occurrence is the consequence of a disorder that draws us closer
to chaos.
I shall give no further examples. One could multiply them
infinitely and not only with humorous ones like those I have just
used.
Theatrically these inversions of form, displacements of sig-
nification could become the essential element of that humorous
poetry in space which is the exclusive province of the mise en
scene.
In a Marx Brothers' film a man thinks he is going to take a

woman in his arms but instead gets a cow, which moos. And
through a conjunction of circumstances which it would take too
long to analyze here, that moo, at just that moment, assumes an
intellectual dignity equal to any woman's cry.
Such a situation, possible in the cinema, is no less possible in
the theater as it exists: it would take very little-for instance,
replace the cow with an animated manikin, a kind of monster
endowed with speech, or a man disguised as an animal-to
rediscover the secret of an objective poetry at the root of humor,
which the theater has renounced and abandoned to the Music
Hall, and which the Cinema later adopted.
A moment ago I mentioned danger. The best way, it seems to
me, to realize this idea of danger on the stage is by the objective
unforeseen, the unforeseen not in situations but in things, the
abrupt, untimely transition from an intellectual
image to a true image; for example, a man who is blaspheming
sees suddenly and realistically materialized before him the image
of his blasphemy (always on condition, I would add, that such an
image is not entirely gratuitous but engenders in its turn other
images in the same spiritual vein, etc.).
Another example would be the sudden appearance of a
fabricated Being, made of wood and cloth, entirely invented,
corresponding to nothing, yet disquieting by nature, capable of
reintroducing on the stage a little breath of that great metaphysical
fear which is at the root of .all ancient theater.
The Balinese with their imaginary dragon, like all the
Orientals, have not lost the sense of that mysterious fear which
they know is one of the most stirring (and indeed essential)
elements of the theater when it is restored to its proper level.
True poetry is, willy nilly, metaphysical and it is just its
metaphysical bearing, I should say, the intensity of its meta-
physical effect, that comprises its essential worth.
This is the second or third time I have brought up metaphysics
here. I was speaking, a moment ago, apropos of psychology, about
dead ideas, and I expect many will be tempted to tell me that if
there is one inhuman idea in the world, one ineffectual and dead
idea which conveys little enough even to the mind, it is indeed the
idea of metaphysics.
This is due, as Rene Guenon says, "to our purely Occidental
way, our anti poetic and truncated way of considering principles
(apart from the massive and energetic spiritual state which
corresponds to them) ."
In the Oriental theater of metaphysical tendencies, as opposed
to the Occidental theater of psychological tendencies, this whole
complex of gestures, signs, postures, and sonorities which
constitute the language of stage performance, this language which
develops all its physical and poetic effects on every level of
consciousness and in all the senses, necessarily induces thought to
adopt profound attitudes which could be called metaphysics-in-
action.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 45
I shall take up this point again in a moment. For the present let
us return to the theater as we know it.
A few days ago, I was present at a discussion about the theater.
I saw some sort of human snakes, otherwise known as
playwrights, explain how to worm a play into the good graces of a
director, like certain men in history who used to insinuate poison
into the ears of their rivals. There was some question, I believe, of
determining the future orientation of the theater and, in other
terms, its destiny.
No one determined anything, and at no time was there any
question of the true destiny of the theater, i.e., of what, by
definition and essence, the theater is destined to represent,
nor of the means at its disposal for realizing this destiny. On the
contrary the theater seemed to me a sort of frozen world, its artists
cramped among gestures that will never be good for anything
again, brittle intonations which are already falling to pieces, music
reduced to a kind of arithmetic whose figures are beginning to
fade, some sort of luminous explosions, themselves congealed and
responding to vague traces of movement-and around all this an
extraordinary fluttering of men in black suits who quarrel over the
receipts, at the threshold of a white-hot box office. As if the
theatrical mechanism were henceforth reduced to all that
surrounds it; and because it is reduced to what surrounds it and
because the theater is reduced to everything that is not the theater,
its atmosphere stinks in the nostrils of people of taste.
For me the theater is identical with its possibilities for
realization when the most extreme poetic results are derived from
them; the possibilities for realization in the theater relate entirely
to the mise en scene considered as a language in space and in
movement.
To derive, then, the most extreme poetic results from the means
of realization is to make metaphysics of them, and
I think no one will object to this way of considering the question.
And to make metaphysics out of language, gestures, attitudes,
sets, and music from a theatrical point of view is, it seems to me,
to consider them in relation to all the ways they can have of
making contact with time and with movement.
. To give objective examples of this poetry that follows upon the
way a gesture, a sonority, an intonation presses with more or less
insistence upon this or that segment of space at such and such a
time appears to me as difficult as to communicate in words the
feeling of a particular sound or the degree and quality of a
physical pain. It depends upon the production and can be
determined only on the stage.
I should now review all the means of expression which the
theater (or the mise en scene, which, in the system I have just
expounded, is identified with it) contains. That would carry me
too far, and I shall simply select from them one or
two examples.
First, the spoken language.
To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make
the language express what it does not ordinarily express: to make
use of it in anew, exceptional, and unaccustomed fashion; to
reveal its possibilities for producing physical shock; to divide and
distribute it actively in space; to deal with intonations in an
absolutely concrete manner, restoring their power to shatter as
well as really to manifest something; to turn against language and
its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources, against its
trapped-beast origins; and finally, to consider language as the
form of Incantation.
Everything in this active poetic mode of envisaging expression
on the stage leads us to abandon the modem humanistic and
psychological meaning of the theater, in order to recover the
religious and mystic preference of which our theater has
completely lost the sense.
If it is enough to pronounce the words religious or mystic to be
taken for a churchwarden or an illiterate priest outside a Buddhist
temple, at best good only for turning prayer
ANTONIN ARTAUD 47
wheels, this merely signifies and condemns our incapacity to
derive the full import from our words and our profound
ignorance of the spirit of synthesis and analogy.
Perhaps it means that at the point where we are we have lost
all touch with the true theater, since we confine it to the domain
of what daily thought can reach, the familiar or unfamiliar
domain of consciousness;-and if we address ourselves theatrically
to the unconscious, it is merely to take from it what it has been
able to collect (or conceal) of accessible everyday experience.
Let it be further said that one of the reasons for the physical
efficacity upon the mind, for the force of the direct images of
action in certain productions of the Oriental theater, such as those
of the Balinese theater, is that this theater is based upon age-old
traditions which have preserved intact the secrets of using
gestures, intonations, and harmonies in relation to the senses and
on all possible levels-this does not condemn the Oriental theater,
but it condemns us, and along with us the state of things in which
we live and which is to be destroyed, destroyed with diligence
and malice on every level and at every point where it prevents
the free exercise of thought.
III. The Alchemical Theater
There is a mysterious identity of essence between the principle of

the theater and that of alchemy. For like alchemy, the theater,
considered from the point of view of its deepest principle, is
developed from a certain number of fundamentals which are the
same for all the arts and which aim on the spiritual and imaginary
level at an efficacity analogous to the process which in the
physical world actually turns all matter into gold. But there is a
still deeper resemblance between the theater and alchemy, one
which leads much further metaphysically. It is that alchemy and
the theater are so to speak virtual arts, and do not carry their end-
or their reality within themselves.
Where alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Double of
an operation which functions only on the level of real matter, the
theater must also be considered as the Double, not of this direct,
everyday reality of which it is gradually being reduced to a mere
inert replica-as empty as it is sugarcoated-but of another
archetypal and dangerous reality, a reality of which the
Principles, like dolphins, once they have shown their heads, hurry
to dive back into the obscurity of the deep.
For this reality is not human but inhuman, and man with his
customs and his character counts for very little in it. Perhaps even
man's head would not be left to him if he were
48
ANTONIN ARTAUD 49
to confide himself to this reality-and even so it would have to be
an absolutely stripped, malleable, and organic head, in which just
enough formal matter would remain so that the principles might
exert their effects within it in a completely physical way.
Before going further, let us consider the curious predilection
for the theatrical vocabulary of all books dealing with alchemical
subjects, as if their authors had sensed from the beginning all that
was representative, I.e., theatrical, in the whole series of symbols
by means of which the Great Work is to be realized spiritually,
while waiting for it to be realized actually and materially, as well
as in the digressions and errors of the ill-informed mind among
these. operations, in the almost "dialectical" sequence of all the
aberrations, phantasms, mirages, and hallucinations which those
who attempt to perform these operations by purely human means
cannot fail to encounter.
All true alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a
mirage as the theater is a mirage. And this perpetual allusion to
the materials. and the principle of the theater found in almost all
alchemical books should be understood as the expression of an
identity (of which alchemists are extremely aware) existing
between the world in which the characters, objects, images, and in
a general way all that constitutes the virtual reality of the theater
develops, and the purely fictitious and illusory world in which the
symbols of alchemy are evolved.
These symbols, which indicate what might be called philo-
sophical states of matter, already start the mind on its way toward
that fiery purification, that unification and that emaciation (in a
horribly simplified and pure sense) of the natural molecules; on its
way toward that operation which permits, by sheer force of
destructive analysis, the reconception and re constitution
of solids according that equilibrium of spiritual descent by which
they ultimately become gold again. It is not sufficiently
understood how much the material symbolism used to designate
this mysterious operation corresponds to a parallel symbolism in
the mind, a deployment of ideas and appearances by which all
that is theatrical in the theater is designated and can be
distinguished philosophically.
Let me explain. Perhaps it has already been understood that the
genre of theater to which I refer has nothing to do with the kind of
realistic, social theater which changes with each historical period
and in which the ideas that animated the theater at its origin can
no longer be discerned except as caricatures of gestures,
unrecognizable because their intention has changed so greatly.
Like words themselves, the ideas of the archetypal, primitive
theater have in time ceased to generate an image, and instead of
being a means of expansion are only an impasse, a mausoleum of
the mind.
Perhaps before proceeding further I shall be asked to define
what I mean by the archetypal, primitive theater. And we shall
thereby approach the very heart of the matter.
If in fact we raise the question of the origins and raison d'etre
(or primordial necessity) of the theater, we find, metaphysically,
the materialization or rather the exteriorization of a kind of
essential drama which would contain, in a manner at once
manifold and unique, the essential principles of all drama, already
disposed and divided, not so much as to lose their character as
principles, but enough to comprise, in a substantial and active
fashion (i.e., resonantly), an infinite perspective of conflicts. To
analyze such a drama philosophically is impossible; only
poetically and by seizing upon what is communicative and
magnetic in the principles of all the arts can we, by shapes,
sounds, music, and volumes, evoke, passing by way of all natural
resemblances of images and affinities to each other not the
primordial directions of the mind, which our excessive logical
intellectualism would reduce to merely
ANTONIN ARTAUD 51
useless schemata, but states of an acuteness so intense and so
absolute that we sense, beyond the tremors of all music and
form, the underlying menace of a chaos as decisive as it is
dangerous.
And this essential drama, we come to realize, exists, and in the
image of something subtler than Creation itself, something which
must be represented as the result of one Will alone-and without
conflict.
We must believe that the essential drama, the one at the root
of all the Great Mysteries, is associated with the second phase of
Creation, that of difficulty and of the Double, that of matter and
the materialization of the idea.
It seems indeed that where simplicity and order reign, there
can be no theater nor drama, and the true theater, like poetry as
well, though by other means, is born out of a kind of organized
anarchy after philosophical battles which are the passionate aspect
of these primitive unifications.
Now these conflicts which the Cosmos in turmoil offers us in a
philosophically distorted and impure manner, alchemy offers us in
all their rigorous intellectuality, since it permits
us to attain once more to the sublime, but with drama, after a
meticulous and unremitting pulverization of every insufficiently
fine, insufficiently matured form, since it follows from the very
principle of alchemy not to let the spirit take its leap until it has
passed through all the filters and foundations of existing matter,
and to redouble this labor at the incandescent edges of the future.
For it might be said that in order to merit material gold, the mind
must first prove that it was capable of the other kind, that it would
have earned it, would have attained to it, only by assenting to it,
by seeing it as a secondary symbol of the. fall it must experience
in order to rediscover in solid and opaque form the expression of
light itself, of rarity, and of irreducibility.
The theatrical operation of making gold, by the immensity
of the conflicts it provokes, by the prodigious number of forces
it throws one against the other and rouses, by this appeal to a sort
of essential redistillation brimming with consequences and
surcharged with spirituality, ultimately evokes in the spirit an
absolute and abstract purity, beyond which there can. be nothing,
and which can be. conceived as a unique sound, defining note,
caught on the wing, the organic part of an indescribable vibration.
The Orphic Mysteries which subjugated Plato must have
possessed on the moral and psychological level something of this
definitive and transcendent aspect .of the alchemical theater, with
elements of an extraordinary psychological density, and
conversely must have evoked the symbols. of alchemy, which
provide the spiritual means of decanting and transfusing matter,
must have evoked the passionate and decisive transfusion of
matter by mind.
We are told that the Mysteries of Eleusis confined themselves
to the mise en scene of a certain number of moral truths. I believe
instead that they must have consisted of projections and
precipitations of conflicts, indescribable battles of
principles joined from that dizzying and slippery perspective in
which every truth is lost in the realization of the inextricable and
unique fusion of the abstract and the concrete, and I think that by
the music of instruments, the combinations of colors and shapes,
of which we have lost every notion, they must have brought to a
climax that. nostalgia for pure beauty of which Plato, at least once
in this world, must have found the complete, sonorous, streaming
naked realization: to resolve by conjunctions unimaginably
strange to our waking minds, to resolve or even annihilate every
conflict produced by the antagonism. of matter and mind, idea
.
and form, concrete and abstract, and to dissolve all appearances

into one unique expression which must have been the equivalent
of spiritualized gold.
IV. On the Balinese Theater
The spectacle of the Balinese theater, which draws upon dance,

song, pantomime-and a little of the theater as we understand it in
the Occident-restores the. theater, by means of ceremonies of
indubitable age and well-tried efficacity, to its original destiny
which it presents as a combination of all these elements fused
together in a perspective of hallucination and fear.
It is very remarkable that the first of the little plays which
compose this spectacle, in which we are shown a father's re-
monstrances to his tradition-flouting daughter, begins with an
entrance of phantoms; the male and female characters who will
develop a dramatic but familiar subject appear to us first in their
spectral aspect and are seen in that hallucinatory perspective
appropriate to every theatrical character, before the situations in
this kind of symbolic sketch are allowed to develop. Here indeed
situations are only a pretext. The drama does not develop as a
conflict of feelings but as a conflict of spiritual states, themselves
ossified and transformed into gestures-diagrams. In a word, the
Balinese have realized, with the utmost rigor, the idea of pure
theater, where everything,
conception and realization alike, has value, has existence only in
proportion to its degree of objectification on the stage. They
victoriously demonstrate the absolute preponderance of the
director (metteur en scene) whose creative power eliminates
53
words. The themes are vague, abstract, extremely general. They
are given life only by the fertility and intricacy of all the artifices
of the stage which impose upon our minds like the conception of
a metaphysics derived from a new use of gesture and voice.
What is in fact curious about all these gestures, these angular
and abruptly abandoned attitudes, these syncopated modulations
formed at the back of the throat, these musical phrases that break
off short, these flights of elytra, these rustlings of branches, these
sounds of hollow drums, these robot squeakings, these dances of
animated manikins, is this: that through the labyrinth of their
gestures, attitudes, and sudden cries, through the gyrations and
turns which leave no portion of the stage space un utilized, the
sense of. anew physical. language, based upon signs and no
longer upon words, is liberated.
These actors with their geometric robes seem to be animated
hieroglyphs. It is not just the shape of their robes which,
displacing the axis of the human figure, create beside the dress of
these warriors in a state 'of trance 'and perpetual war a kind of
second, symbolic dress and thus inspire an intellectual idea, or
which merely. connect, by all the intersections of their lines, with
all the intersections of perspective in space. No, these spiritual
signs have a precise meaning which strikes us only intuitively but
with enough violence to make useless any translation into logical
discursive language. And for the lovers of realism at all costs,
who might find exhausting these perpetual allusions to secret
attitudes. inaccessible to thought, there remains the eminently
realistic play of the double who is terrified by the apparitions
from beyond. In this double-,.-trembling, yelping childishly,
these heels
striking the ground in cadences that follow the very automatism
of the liberated unconscious, this momentary concealment behind
his own reality-there is a description of fear
valid in every latitude, an indication that in the human as
ANTONIN ARTAUD 55
well as. the superhuman the Orientals are more than a match for
us in matters of reality.
The Balinese, who have a vocabulary of gesture and mime for
every circumstance of life, reinstate the superior worth of
theatrical conventions,. .demonstrate. the forcefulness and greater
emotional value of a certain number of perfectly learned and
above all masterfully applied conventions. . One of the reasons for
our delight. in this faultless performance lies precisely in the use
these actors make of an exact quantity of specific gestures, of
well-tried mime .at a given point, and above all in the prevailing
spiritual tone, the deep and subtle study that has presided at the
elaboration of these plays of expression, these powerful signs
which give us the impression that their power has not weakened
during thousands of years. These mechanically rolling eyes,
pouting lips, and muscular spasms, all producing methodically
calculated effects which forbid any recourse to spontaneous
improvisation, these horizontally moving heads that seem to glide
from one shoulder to the other as if on rollers, everything that
might correspond to immediate psychological necessities,
corresponds as well to a sort of spiritual architecture, created out
of gesture and mime but also out of the evocative power of a
system, the musical quality of a physical movement, the parallel
and admirably fused harmony of a tone. This may perhaps shock
our European sense of stage freedom and spontaneous inspiration,
but let no one say that this mathematics creates sterility or
uniformity. The marvel is that a sensation of richness, of fantasy
and prodigality emanates from this spectacle ruled with a
maddening scrupulosity and consciousness. And the most
commanding interpenetrations join sight to sound, intellect to
sensibility, the gesture of a character to the evocation of a plant's
movement across the scream of an instrument.
The sighs of wind instruments prolong the vibrations of vocal
cords with a sense of such oneness that you do not know
whether it is the voice itself that is continuing or the identity
which has absorbed the voice from the beginning. A rippling of
joints, the musical angle made by the arm with the forearm, a foot
falling, a knee bending, fingers that seem to be coming loose from
the hand, it is all like a perpetual play of mirrors in which human
limbs seem resonant with echoes, harmonies in which the notes of
the orchestra, the whispers of wind instruments evoke the idea of
a monstrous aviary in which the actors themselves would be the
fluttering wings. Our theater which has never had the idea of this
metaphysics of gesture nor known how to make music serve such
immediate, such concrete dramatic ends, our purely verbal theater,
unaware of everything that makes theater, of everything that
exists in the air of the stage, which is measured and circumscribed
by that air and has a density in space-movements, shapes, colors,
vibrations, attitudes, screams-our theater might, with respect to
the unmeasurable, which derives from the mind's capacity for
receiving suggestion, be given lessons in spirituality from the
Balinese theater. This purely popular and not sacred theater gives
us an extraordinary idea of the intellectual level of a people who
take the struggles of a soul preyed upon by ghosts and phantoms
from the beyond as the basis for their civic festivals. For it is
indeed a purely interior struggle that is staged in the last part of
the spectacle. And we can remark in passing on the degree of
theatrical sumptuousness which the Balinese have been able to
give this struggle: their sense of the plastic requirements of the
stage is equalled only by their knowledge of physical fear and the
means of unleashing it. And there is in the truly terrifying look of
their devil (probably Tibetan) a striking similarity to the look of a
certain puppet in our own remembrance, a puppet with swollen
hands of white gelatine and nails of green foliage, which was the
most beautiful ornament of one of the first plays performed by
Alfred Jarry's theater.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 57
This spectacle is more than we can assimilate, assailing us with
a superabundance of impressions, each richer than the next, but in
a language to which it seems we no longer have the key; and this
kind of irritation created by the impossibility of finding the thread
and tracking the beast down-the impossibility of putting one's ear
closer to the instrument in order to hear better-is one charm the
more to the credit of this spectacle. And by language I do not
mean an idiom indecipherable at first hearing, but precisely that
sort of theatrical language foreign to every spoken tongue, a
language in which an overwhelming stage experience seems to be
communicated, in comparison with which our productions
depending exclusively upon dialogue seem like so much stut-
tering.
What is in fact most striking in this spectacle-so well contrived
to disconcert our Occidental conceptions of theater that many will
deny it has any theatrical quality, whereas it is the most beautiful
manifestation of pure theater it has been our privilege to see-what
is striking and disconcerting for Europeans like ourselves is the
admirable intellectuality that
one senses crackling everywhere in the close and subtle web of
gestures, in the infinitely varied modulations of voice, in this
sonorous rain resounding as if from an immense dripping forest,
and in the equally sonorous interlacing of movements.
There is no transition from a gesture to a cry or a sound: all the
senses interpenetrate, as if through strange channels hollowed out
in the mind itself!
Here is a whole collection of ritual gestures to which we do
not have the key and which seem to obey extremely precise
musical indications, with something more that does not generally
belong to music and seems intended to encircle thought, to hound
it down and lead it into an inextricable and certain system. In fact
everything in this theater is calculated with an enchanting
mathematical meticulousness. Nothing is left
to chance or to personal initiative. It is a kind of superior dance, in
which the dancers were actors first of all.
Repeatedly they seem to accomplish a kind of recovery with
measured steps. Just when they appear to be lost in the middle of
an inextricable labyrinth of measures or about to overturn in the
confusion, they have their own way of recovering equilibrium, a
particular buttressing of the body, of the twisted legs, which gives
the impression of a sopping rag being wrung out in tempo;-and on
three final steps, which lead them ineluctably to the middle of the.
stage, the suspended rhythm is completed, the measure made
clear.
Everything is thus regulated and impersonal; not. a movement
of the muscles, not the rolling of an eye but seem to belong to a
kind of reflective mathematics which controls everything and by
means of which everything happens. And the strange thing is that
in this systematic depersonalization, in these purely muscular
facial expressions, applied to the features like masks, everything
produces a significance, everything affords the maximum effect.
A kind of terror seizes us at the thought of these mechanized
beings, whose joys and griefs seem not their own but at the
service of age-old rites, as if they were dictated by
superior intelligences. In the last analysis it is this impression of a
superior and prescribed Life which strikes us most in this
spectacle that so much resembles a rite one might profane. It has
the solemnity of a sacred rite-the hieratic quality of the costumes
gives each actor a double body and a double set of limbs-and the
dancer bundled into his costume seems to be nothing more than
his own effigy. Over and beyond the music's broad, overpowering
rhythm there is another extremely fragile, hesitant, and sustained
music in which, it seems, the most precious metals are being
pulverized, where springs of water are bubbling up as.. in the
state of nature, and long processions of insects file through the
plants, with a sound
AN'J,'ONIN ARTAUD 59
like that of light itself, in which the noises of deep solitudes seem
to be distilled into showers of crystals, etc. . . .
Furthermore all these sounds are linked to movements, as if
they were the natural consummation of gestures which have the
same musical quality, and this with such a sense of musical
analogy that the mind finally finds itself doomed to confusion,
attributing to the separate gesticulations of the dancers the
sonorous properties of the orchestra-and vice versa.
An impression of inhumanity, of the divine, of miraculous
revelation is further provided by the exquisite beauty of the
women's headdress: this series of banked luminous circles, made
from combinations of multicolored feathers or from pearls of so
beautiful a coloration that their combination has a quality of
revelation, and the crests of which tremble rhythmically,
responding consciously, or so it seems, to the tremblings of the
body.-There are also the other headdresses of sacerdotal character,
in the shape of tiaras and topped with egret crests and stiff flowers
in pairs of contrasting, strangely harmonizing colors.
This dazzling ensemble full of explosions, flights, secret
streams, detours in every direction of both external and internal
perception, composes a sovereign idea of the theater, as it has
been preserved for us down through the centuries in order to teach
us what the theater never should have ceased to be. And this
impression is doubled by the fact that this spectacle-popular, it
seems, and secular-is like the common bread of artistic sensations
among those people.
Setting aside the prodigious mathematics of this spectacle,
what seems most surprising and astonishing to us is this aspect of
matter as revelation, suddenly dispersed in signs to teach us the
metaphysical identity of concrete and abstract and to teach us this
in gestures made to last. For though we are familiar with the
realistic aspect of matter, it is here developed to the nth power and
definitively stylized.
In this theater all creation comes from the stage, finds its
expression and its origins alike in a secret psychic impulse which
is Speech before words.
It is a theater which eliminates tile-author in favor of what we

would call, in our Occidental theatrical jargon, the director; but a
director who has become a kind of manager of magic, a master of
sacred ceremonies. And the material on which he works, the
themes he brings to throbbing life are derived not from him but
from the gods. They come, it seems, from elemental
interconnections of Nature which a double Spirit has
fostered. .
What he sets in motion is the MANIFESTED.
This is a sort of primary Physics, from which Spirit has
never disengaged itself.
In a spectacle like that of Balinese theater there is something

that has nothing to do with entertainment, the notion of useless,
artificial amusement, of an evening's pastime which is the
characteristic of our theater. The Balinese productions take shape
at the very heart of matter, life, reality. There is in them
something of the ceremonial quality of a religious rite, in the
sense that they extirpate from the mind of the onlooker all idea of
pretense, of cheap imitations of reality. This intricately detailed
gesticulation has one goal, an immediate goal which it approaches
by efficacious means, whose efficacity we are even meant to
experience immediately. The thoughts it aims at, the spiritual
states it seeks to create, the mystic solutions it proposes are
aroused and attained without delay or circumlocution. All of
which seems to be an exorcism to make our demons FLOW.
There is a low hum of instinctual matters in this theater, but

they are wrought to that point of transparency, intelligence,
ANTONIN ARTAUD 61
and ductility at which they seem to furnish us in physical terms
some of the spirit's most secret insights.
The themes selected derive, one might say, from the stage
itself. They have reached such a point of objective materialization
that one cannot imagine them outside this close perspective, this
confined and limited globe of performing space.
This spectacle offers us a marvelous complex of pure stage
images, for the comprehension of which a whole new language
seems to have been invented: the actors with their costumes
constitute veritable living, moving hieroglyphs. And these three-
dimensional hieroglyphs are in turn brocaded with a certain
number of gestures-mysterious signs which correspond to some
unknown, fabulous, and obscure reality which we here in the
Occident have completely repressed.
There is something that has this character of a magic operation
in this intense liberation of signs, restrained at first and then
suddenly thrown into the air.
A chaotic boiling, full of recognizable particles and at
moments strangely orderly, crackles in this effervescence of
painted rhythms in which the many fermatas unceasingly make
their entrance like a well-calculated silence.
Of this idea of pure theater, which is merely theoretical in the

Occident and to which no one has ever attempted to give the least
reality, the Balinese offer us a stupefying realization, suppressing
all possibility of recourse to words for the elucidation of the most
abstract themes-inventing a language of gesture to be developed
in space, a language without meaning except in the circumstances
of the stage.
The stage space is utilized in all its dimensions and, one might
say, on all possible planes. For in addition to an acute sense of
plastic beauty, these gestures always have as their
final goal the elucidation of a spiritual state or problem.
At least that is the way they appear to us.
No point of space and at the same time no possible suggestion
has been lost. And there is a philosophical sense, so to speak, of
the power which nature has of suddenly hurling everything into
chaos.
One senses in the Balinese theater a state prior to language and

which can choose its own: music, gestures, movements, words.
It is certain that this aspect of pure theater, this physics .of

absolute gesture which is the idea itself and which transforms the
mind's conceptions into events perceptible through the labyrinths
and fibrous interlacings of matter, gives us a new idea of what
belongs by nature to the domain of forms and manifested matter.
Those who succeed in giving a mystic sense to the simple form of
a robe and who, not content with placing a man's Double next to
him, confer upon each man in his robes a double made of clothes-
those who pierce these illusory or secondary clothes with a saber,
giving them the look of huge butterflies pinned in the air, such
men have an innate sense of the absolute and magical symbolism
of nature much superior to ours, and set us an example which it is
only too certain our own theater technicians will be powerless to
profit from.
That intellectual space, psychic interplay, and silence solidified

by thought which exist between the members of a written phrase
is here, in the scenic space, traced between the members, the air,
and the perspectives of a certain number of shouts, colors and
movements.
In the performances of the Balinese theater the mind has the

feeling that conception at first stumbled against gesture, gained
its footing in the midst of a whole ferment of visual or sonorous
images, thoughts as it were in a pure state. To put
ANTONIN ARTAUD 63
it briefly and more clearly, something akin to the musical state
must have existed for this mise en scene where everything that is a
conception of the mind is only a pretext, a virtuality whose double
has produced this intense stage poetry, this many-hued
spatia1language.
This perpetual play of mirrors passing from color to gesture

and from cry to movement leads us unceasingly along roads
rough and difficult for the mind, plunges us into that state of
uncertainty and ineffable anguish which is the characteristic of
poetry.
These strange games of flying hands, like insects in the green
air of evening, communicate a sort of horrible obsession, an
inexhaustible mental ratiocination, like a mind ceaselessly taking
its bearings in the maze of its unconscious.
And what this theater makes palpable for us and captures in
concrete signs are much less matters of feeling than of
intelligence.
And it is by intellectual paths that it introduces us into the
reconquest of the signs of what exists.
From this point of view the gesture of the central. dancer who
always touches his head at the same place, as if wishing to
indicate the position and existence of some unimaginable central
eye, some intellectual egg, is highly significant.
What occurs as a highly colored reference to physical im-

pressions of nature is taken up again on the level of sounds, and
the sound itself is only the nostalgic representation of something
else, a sort of magic state where sensations have become so subtle
that they are a pleasure for the spirit to frequent. And even the
imitative harmonies, the sound of the rattlesnake and rustlings of
dried insects against each other, suggest the glade of a swarming
landscape ready to hurl itself into chaos.-And these dancers
dressed in dazzling clothes,
whose bodies beneath seem wrapped in swaddling-bands! There
is something umbilical, larval in their movement. And at the same
time we must remark on the hieroglyphic aspect of their costumes,
the horizontal lines of which project beyond the body -in every
direction. They are like. huge insects full of lines and segments
drawn to connect them with an unknown natural perspective of
which they seem nothing more than a, kind of detached geometry.
These costumes which encircle their abstract rotations when
they walk, and the strange crisscrossings of their feet!
Each of their movements traces a line in space, completes
some unknown rigorous figure in the ritual of.. a hermetic
formula which an unforeseen gesture of the hand completes.
And the folds of these robes, curving above the buttocks, hold
them as if suspended in air, as if pinned to the depths of the
theater, and prolong each of their leaps into a flight.
These howls, these rolling eyes, this continuous abstraction,
these noises of branches, noises of the cutting and rolling of
wood, all within the immense area of widely diffused sounds
disgorged from many sources, combine to overwhelm the mind, to
crystallize as a new and, I dare say, concrete conception of the
abstract.
And it must be noted that when this abstraction, which springs
from a marvelous scenic edifice to return into thought, encounters
in its flight certain impressions from the world of nature, it
always seizes them at the point at which their molecular
combinations are beginning to break up: a gesture narrowly
divides us from chaos.
The last part of the spectacle is-in contrast to all the dirt,
brutality, and infamy chewed up by our European stages-a
delightful anachronism. And I do not know what other theater
would dare to pin down in this way as if true to nature the throes
of a soul at the mercy of phantasms from the Beyond.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 65
These metaphysicians of natural disorder who in dancing
restore to us every atom of sound and every fragmentary per-
ception as if these were now about to rejoin their own generating
principles, are able to wed movment and sound so perfectly that it
seems the dancers have hollow bones to make these noises of
resonant drums and woodblocks with their hollow wooden limbs.
Here we are suddenly in deep metaphysical anguish, and the
rigid aspect of the body in trance, stiffened by the tide of cosmic
forces which besiege it, is admirably expressed by that frenetic
dance of rigidities and angles, in which one suddenly feels the
mind begin to plummet downwards.
As if waves of matter were tumbling over each other, dashing
their crests into the deep and flying from all sides of the horizon
to be enclosed in one minute portion of tremor and trance-to
cover over the void of fear.
There is an absolute in these constructed perspectives, a real

physical absolute which only Orientals are capable of
envisioning-it is in the loftiness and thoughtful boldness of their
goals that these conceptions differ from our European
conceptions of theater, even more than in the strange perfection
of their performances.
Advocates of the division and partitioning of genres can
pretend to see mere dancers in the magnificent artists of the
Balinese theater, dancers entrusted with the representation of
unexplained, lofty Myths whose very elevation renders the level
of our modern Occidental theater unspeakably gross and childish.
The truth is that the Balinese theater suggests, and in its
productions enacts, themes of pure theater upon which the stage
performance confers an intense equilibrium, a wholly
materialized gravity.
Everything in this theater is immersed in a profound in-

toxication which restores to us the very elements of ecstasy,
and in ecstasy we discover the dry seething, the mineral friction
of plants, vestiges and ruins of trees illuminated on their faces.
Bestiality and every trace of animality are reduced to their
spare gesture: mutinous noises of the splitting earth, the sap of
trees, animal yawns.
The dancers' feet, in kicking aside their robes, dissolve
thoughts and sensations, permitting them to recover their pure
state.
And always this confrontation of the head, this Cyclops'
eye, the inner eye of the mind which the right hand gropes for.
The sign language of spiritual gestures which measure, prune,
fix, separate, and subdivide feelings, states of the soul,
metaphysical ideas.
This theater of quintessences in which things perform a
strange about-face before becoming abstractions again.
Their gestures fall so accurately upon this rhythm of the

hollow drums, accent it, and seize it in flight with such sureness
and at such climactic moments that it seems the very abyss of
their hollow limbs which the music is going to scan.
And the women's stratified, lunar eyes:

Eyes of dreams which seem to absorb our own, eyes before
which we ourselves appear to be fantome.
Utter satisfaction from these dance gestures, from these

turning feet mingling with states of the soul, from these little
flying hands, these dry and precise tappings.
We are watching a mental alchemy which makes a gesture of

a state of mind-the dry, naked, linear gesture all our acts could
have if they sought the absolute.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 67
It happens that this mannerism, this excessively hieratic style,
with its rolling alphabet, its shrieks of splitting stones, noises of
branches, noises of the cutting and rolling of wood, compose a
sort of animated material murmur in the air, in space, a visual as
well as audible whispering. And after an instant the magic
identification is made: WE KNOW IT IS WE WHO WERE
SPEAKING.
Who, after the formidable battle between Arjuna and the
Dragon, will dare to say that the whole of theater is not on the
stage, i.e., beyond situations and words?
The dramatic and psychological situations have passed here
into the very sign language of the combat, which is a function of
the mystic athletic play of bodies and the so to speak undulatory
use of the stage, whose enormous spiral reveals itself in one
perspective after another.
The warriors enter the mental forest rocking with fear,
overwhelmed by a great shudder, a voluminous magnetic
whirling in which we can sense the rush of animal or mineral
meteors.
It is more than a physical tempest, it is a spiritual concussion
that is signified in the general trembling of their limbs and their
rolling eyes. The sonorous pulsation of their bristling heads is at
times excruciating-and the music sways behind them and at the
same time sustains an unimaginable space into which real pebbles
finally roll.
And behind the Warrior, bristling from the formidable cosmic
tempest, is the Double who struts about, given up to the
childishness of his schoolboy gibes, and who, roused by the
repercussion of the turmoil, moves unaware in the midst of spells
of which he has understood nothing.
V. Oriental and Occidental Theater
The Balinese theater has revealed to us a physical and nonverbal

idea of the theater, in which the theater is contained within the
limits of everything that can happen on a stage, independently of
the written text, whereas the theater as we conceive it in the
Occident has declared its alliance with the text and finds itself
limited by it. For the Occidental theater the Word is everything,
and there is no possibility of expression without it; the theater is a
branch of literature, a kind of sonorous species of language, and
even if we admit a difference between the text spoken on the stage
and the text read by the eyes, if we restrict theater to what
happens between cues, we have still not managed to separate it
from the idea of a performed text.
This idea of the supremacy of speech in the theater is so
deeply rooted in us, and the theater seems to such a degree
merely the material reflection of the text, that everything in the
theater that exceeds this text, that is not kept within its limits and
strictly conditioned by it, seems to us purely a matter of mise en
scene, and quite inferior in comparison with the text.
Presented with this subordination of theater to speech, one
might indeed wonder whether the theater by any chance
possesses its own language, whether it is entirely fanciful to
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ANTONIN ARTAUD 69
consider it as an independent and autonomous art, of the same
rank as music, painting, dance, etc. . . .
One finds in any case that this language, if it exists, is
necessarily identified with the mise en scene considered:
1. as the visual and plastic materialization of speech,
2. as the language of everything that can be said and signified
upon a stage independently of speech, everything that finds its
expression in space, or that can be affected or disintegrated by it.
Once we regard this language of the mise en scene as the pure
theatrical language, we must discover whether it can attain the
same internal ends as speech, whether theatrically and from the
point of view of the mind it can claim the same intellectual
efficacy as the spoken language. One can wonder, in other words,
whether it has the power, not to define thoughts but to cause
thinking, whether it may not entice the mind
to take profound and efficacious attitudes toward it from its own
point of view.
In a word, to raise the question of the intellectual efficacity
of expression by means of objective forms, of the intellectual
efficacity of a language which would use only shapes, or noise, or
gesture, is to raise the question of the intellectual efficacy of art.
If we have come to attribute to art nothing more than the
values of pleasure and relaxation and constrain it to a purely
formal use of forms within the harmony of certain external
relations, that in no way spoils its profound expressive value; but
the spiritual infirmity of the Occident, which is the place
par excellence where men have confused art and aestheticism, is
to think that its painting would function only as painting, dance
which would be merely plastic, as if in an attempt to castrate the
forms of art, to sever their ties with all the mystic attitudes they
might acquire in confrontation with the absolute.
One therefore understands that the theater, to the very degree
that it remains confined within its own language and in
correlation with it, must break with actuality. Its object is not to
resolve social or psychological conflicts, to serve as battlefield
for moral passions, but to express objectively certain secret
truths, to bring into the light of day by means of active gestures
certain aspects of truth that have been buried under forms in their
encounters with Becoming.
To do that, to link the theater to the expressive possibilities of
forms, to everything in the domain of gestures, noises, colors,
movements, etc., is to restore it to its original direction, to
reinstate it in its religious and metaphysical aspect, is to
reconcile it with the universe.
But words, it will be said, have metaphysical powers; it is
not forbidden to conceive of speech as well as of gestures on
the universal level, and it is on that level moreover that speech
acquires its major efficacity, like a dissociative force exerted
upon physical appearances, and upon all states in which the mind
feels stabilized and tends towards repose. And we can readily
answer that this metaphysical way of considering speech is not
that of the Occidental theater, which employs speech not as an
active force springing out of the destruction of appearances in
order to reach the mind itself, but on the contrary as a completed
stage of thought which is lost at the moment of its own
exteriorization.
Speech in the Occidental theater is used only to express
psychological conflicts particular to man and the daily reality of
his life. His conflicts are clearly accessible to spoken language,
and whether they remain in the psychological sphere
or leave it to enter the social sphere, the interest of the drama will
still remain a moral one according to the way in which its
conflicts attack and disintegrate the characters. And it will indeed
always be a matter of a domain in which the verbal solutions of
speech will retain their advantage. But these moral conflicts by
their very nature have no absolute need of the
ANTONIN ARTAUD 71
stage to be resolved. To cause spoken language or expression by
words to dominate on the stage the objective expression of
gestures and of everything which affects the mind by sensuous
and spatial means is to turn one's back on the physical necessities
of the stage and to rebel against its possibilities.
. It must be said that the domain of the theater is not psychological
but plastic and physical. And it is not a question of whether the
physical language of theater is capable of achieving the same
psychological resolutions as the language of words, whether it is
able to express feelings and passions as well as words, but
whether there are not attitudes in the realm of thought and
intelligence that words are incapable of grasping and that gestures
and everything partaking of a spatial language attain with more
precision than they.
Before giving an example of the relations between the physical
world and the deepest states of mind, let me quote what I have
written elsewhere:
"All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to
betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression
hides what it makes manifest. It sets the mind in opposition to the
real void of nature by creating in reaction a kind of fullness in
thought. Or, in other terms, in relation to the manifestation-
illusion of nature it creates a void in thought. All powerful feeling
produces in us the idea of the void. And the lucid language which
obstructs the appearance
of this void also obstructs the appearance of poetry in thought.
That is why an image, an allegory, a figure that masks what it
would reveal have more significance for the spirit than the
lucidities of speech and its analytics.
"This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting
sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose."
The nightmares of Flemish painting strike us by the juxta-
position with the real world of what is only a caricature of that
world; they offer the specters we encounter in our dreams. They
originate in those half-dreaming states that produce
clumsy, ambiguous gestures and embarrassing slips of the tongue:
beside a forgotten child they place a leaping harp; near a human
embryo swimming in underground waterfalls they show an army's
advance against a redoubtable fortress. Beside the imaginary
uncertainty the march of certitude, and beyond a yellow
subterranean light the orange flash of a great autumn sun just
about to set.
It is not a matter of suppressing speech in the theater but of
changing its role, and especially of reducing its position, of
considering it as something else than a means of conducting
human characters to their external ends, since the theater is
concerned only with the way feelings and passions conflict with
one another, and man with man, in life.
To change the role of speech in theater is to make use of
it in a concrete and spatial sense, combining it with everything in
the theater that is spatial and significant in the concrete domain;--
to manipulate it like a solid object, one which overturns and
disturbs things, in the air first of all, then in an infinitely more
mysterious and secret domain but one that admits of extension,
and it will not be very difficult to identify this secret but
extended domain with that of formal anarchy on the one hand but
also with that of continuous formal creation on the other.
This is why the identification of the theater's purpose with
every possibility of formal and extended manifestation gives rise
to the idea of a certain poetry in space which itself is taken for
sorcery.
In the Oriental theater of metaphysical tendency, contrasted to
the Occidental theater of psychological tendency, forms
assume and extend their sense and their significations on all
possible levels; or, if you will, they set up vibrations not on a
single level, but on every level of the mind at once.
And it is because of the multiplicity of their aspects that they
can disturb and charm and continuously excite the mind. It is
because the Oriental theater does not deal with the external
ANTONIN ARTAUD 73
aspects of things on a single level nor rest content with the simple
obstacle or with the impact of these aspects on the senses, but
instead considers the degree of mental possibility from which
they issue, that it participates in the intense poetry of nature and
preserves its magic relations with all the objective degrees of
universal magnetism.
It is in the light of magic and sorcery that the mise en scene
must be considered, not as the reflection of a written text, the
mere projection of physical doubles that is derived from the
written work, but as the burning projection of all the objective
consequences of a gesture, word, sound, music, and their com-
binations. This active projection can be made only upon the stage
and its consequences found in the presence of and upon the stage;
and the author who uses written words only has nothing to do
with the theater and must give way to specialists in its objective
and animated sorcery.
VI. No More Masterpieces
One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we

live without possible escape or remedy--and in which we all
share, even the most revolutionary among us--is our respect for
what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been
given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted, were
not at a point where things must break apart if they are to start
anew and begin fresh.
We must have done with this idea of masterpieces reserved for
a self-styled elite and not understood by the general public; the
mind has no such restricted districts as those so often used for
clandestine sexual encounters.
Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not
good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and
even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way
that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of
feeling, and understandable to everyone.
It is idiotic to reproach the masses for having no sense of the
sublime, when the sublime is confused with one or another of its
formal manifestations, which are moreover always defunct
manifestations. And if for example a contemporary public does
not understand Oedipus Rex, I shall make bold to say that it is the
fault of Oedipus Rex and not of the public.
In Oedipus Rex there is the theme of incest and the idea that
nature mocks at morality and that there are certain un
74
ANTONIN ARTAUD 75
specified powers at large which we would do well to beware of,
call them destiny or anything you choose.
There is in addition the presence of a plague epidemic which is
a physical incarnation of these powers. But the whole in a manner
and language that have lost all touch with the rude and epileptic
rhythm of our time. Sophocles speaks grandly perhaps, but in a
style that is no longer timely. His language is too refined for this
age, it is as if he were speaking beside the point.
However, a public that shudders at train wrecks, that is familiar
with earthquakes, plagues, revolutions, wars; that is sensitive to
the disordered anguish of love, can be affected by all these grand
notions and asks only to become aware of them, but on condition
that it is addressed in its own language, and that its knowledge of
these things does not come to it through adulterated trappings and
speech that belong to extinct eras which will never live again.
Today as yesterday, the public is greedy for mystery: it asks
only to become aware of the laws according to which destiny
manifests itself, and to divine perhaps the secret of its apparitions.
Let us leave textual criticism to graduate students, formal
criticism to esthetes, and recognize that what has been said is not
still to be said; that an expression does not have the same value
twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken, are
dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, that
a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to
be replaced by another, and that the theater is the only place in
the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the
same way twice.
If the public does not frequent our literary masterpieces, it is
because those masterpieces are literary, that is to say, fixed; and
fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time.
Far from blaming the public, we ought to blame the formal
screen we interpose between ourselves and the public, and this
new form of idolatry, the idolatry of fixed masterpieces which is
one of the aspects of bourgeois conformism.
This conformism makes us confuse sublimity, ideas, and things
with the forms they have taken in time and in our minds--in our
snobbish, precious, aesthetic mentalities which the public does
not understand.
How pointless in such matters to accuse the public of bad taste
because it relishes insanities, so long as the public is not shown a
valid spectacle; and I defy anyone to show me here a spectacle
valid--valid in the supreme sense of the theater-since the last
great romantic melodramas, i.e., since a hundred years ago.
The public, which takes the false for the true, has the sense of
the true and always responds to it when it is manifested. However
it is not upon the stage that the true is to be sought nowadays, but
in the street; and if the crowd in the street is offered an occasion
to show its human dignity, it will always do so.
lf people are out of the habit of going to the theater, if we have
all finally come to think of theater as an inferior art, a means of
popular distraction, and to use it as an outlet for our worst
instincts, it is because we have learned too well what the theater
has been, namely, falsehood and illusion. It is because we have
been accustomed for four hundred years, that is since the
Renaissance, to a purely descriptive and narrative theater--
storytelling psychology; it is because every possible ingenuity has
been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but
detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the
other--and because the public is no longer shown anything but the
mirror of itself.
Shakespeare himself is responsible for this aberration and
decline, this disinterested idea of the theater which wishes a
theatrical performance to leave the public intact, without
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ANTONIN ARTAUD
setting off one image that will shake the organism to its
foundations and leave an ineffaceable scar.
If, in Shakespeare, a man is sometimes preoccupied with what
transcends him, it is always in order to determine the ultimate
consequences of this preoccupation within him, i.e., psychology.
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 seems to
me to have reached its lowest point. And I think both the theater
and we ourselves have had enough of psychology.
I believe furthermore that we can all agree on this matter
sufficiently so that there is no need to descend to the repugnant
level of the modem and French theater to condemn the theater of
psychology.
Stories about money, worry over money, social careerism, the
pangs of love unspoiled by altruism, sexuality sugarcoated with
an eroticism that has lost its mystery have nothing to do with the
theater, even if they do belong to psychology. These torments,
seductions, and lusts before which we are nothing but Peeping
Toms gratifying our cravings, tend to go bad, and their rot turns
to revolution: we must take this into account.
But this is not our most serious concern.
If Shakespeare and his imitators have gradually insinuated
the idea of art for art's sake, with art on one side and life on the
other, we can rest on this feeble and lazy idea only as
long as the life outside endures. But there are too many signs that
everything that used to sustain our lives no longer does so, that
we are all mad, desperate, and sick. And I call for us to react.
This idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists
only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an
unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.
Our literary admiration for Rimbaud, Jarry, Lautreamont, and a
few others, which has driven two men to suicide, but turned into
cafe gossip for the rest, belongs to this idea of literary poetry, of
detached art, of neutral spiritual activity which creates nothing
and produces nothing; and I can bear witness that at the very
moment when that kind of personal poetry which involves only
the man who creates it and only at the moment he creates it broke
out in its most abusive fashion, the theater was scorned more than
ever before by poets who have never had the sense of direct and
concerted action, nor of efficacity, nor of danger.
We must get rid of our superstitious valuation of texts and
written poetry. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then
should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what
has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be,
that petrifies us, deadens our responses, and prevents us from
making contact with that underlying power, call it thought-
energy, the life force, the determinism of change, lunar menses, or
anything you like. Beneath the poetry of the texts, there is the
actual poetry, without form and without text. And just as the
efficacity of masks in the magic practices of certain tribes is
exhausted--and these masks are no longer good for anything
except museums--so the poetic efficacity of a text is exhausted;
yet the poetry and the efficacity of the theater are exhausted least
quickly of all, since they permit the action of what is gesticulated
and pronounced, and which is never made the same way twice.
It is a question of knowing what we want. If we are prepared
for war, plague, famine, and slaughter we do not even need to say
so, we have only to continue as we are; continue behaving like
snobs, rushing en masse to hear such and such a singer, to see
such and such an admirable performance which never transcends
the realm of art (and even the Russian ballet at the height of its
splendor never transcended the
ANTONIN ARTAUD 79
realm of art), to marvel at such and such an exhibition of painting
in which exciting shapes explode here and there but at random
and without any genuine consciousness of the forces they could
rouse.
This empiricism, randomness, individualism, and anarchy
must cease.
Enough of personal poems, benefitting those who create
them much more than those who read them.
Once and for all, enough of this closed, egoistic, and personal
art.
Our spiritual anarchy and intellectual disorder is a function of
the anarchy of everything else--or rather, everything else is a
function of this anarchy.
I am not one of those who believe that civilization has to
change in order for the theater to change; but I do believe that the
theater, utilized in the highest and most difficult sense possible,
has the power to influence the aspect and formation of things: and
the encounter upon the stage of two passionate manifestations,
two living centers, two nervous magnetisms is something as
entire, true, even decisive, as, in life, the encounter of one
epidermis with another in a timeless debauchery.
That is why I propose a theater of cruelty.--With this mania we
all have for depreciating everything, as soon as I have said
"cruelty," everybody will at once take it to mean
"blood." But "theater of cruelty" means a theater difficult and
cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is
not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at
each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like
Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or
neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more
terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against
us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And
the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.
Either we will be capable of returning by present-day means to
this superior idea of poetry and poetry-through-theater which
underlies the Myths told by the great ancient tragedians, capable
once more of entertaining a religious idea of the theater (without
meditation, useless contemplation, and vague dreams), capable of
attaining awareness and a possession of certain dominant forces,
of certain notions that control all others, and (since ideas, when
they are effective, carry their energy with them) capable of
recovering within ourselves those energies which ultimately
create order and increase the value of life, or else we might as
well abandon ourselves now, without protest, and recognize that
we are no longer good for anything but disorder, famine, blood,
war, and epidemics.
Either we restore all the arts to a central attitude and necessity,
finding an analogy between a gesture made in painting or the
theater, and a gesture made by lava in a volcanic explosion, or we
must stop painting, babbling, writing, or doing whatever it is we
do.
I propose to bring back into the theater this elementary
magical idea, taken up by modern psychoanalysis, which consists
in effecting a patient's cure by making him assume the apparent
and exterior attitudes of the desired condition.
I propose to renounce our empiricism of imagery, in which
the unconscious furnishes images at random, and which the poet
arranges at random too, calling them poetic and hence hermetic
images, as if the kind of trance that poetry provides did not have
its reverberations throughout the whole sensibility, in every
nerve, and as if poetry were some vague force whose movements
were invariable.
I propose to return through the theater to an idea of the
physical knowledge of images and the means of inducing trances,
as in Chinese medicine which knows, over the entire extent of
the human anatomy, at what points to puncture in order to
regulate the subtlest functions.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 81
Those who have forgotten the communicative power and
magical mimesis of a gesture, the theater can reinstruct, because a
gesture carries its energy with it, and there are still human beings
in the theater to manifest the force of the
gesture made.
To create art is to deprive a gesture of its reverberation in the
organism, whereas this reverberation, if the gesture is made in the
conditions and with the force required, incites the organism and,
through it, .the entire individuality, to take attitudes in harmony
with the gesture.
The theater is the only place in the world, the last general
means we still possess of directly affecting the organism and, in
periods of neurosis and petty sensuality like the one in which we
are immersed, of attacking this sensuality by physical means it
cannot withstand.
If music affects snakes, it is not on account of the spiritual
notions it offers them, but because snakes are long and coil their
length upon the earth, because their bodies touch the earth at
almost every point; and because the musical vibrations which are
communicated to the earth affect them like a very subtle, very
long massage; and I propose to treat the spectators like the
snakecharmer's subjects and conduct them by means of their
organisms to an apprehension of the subtlest notions.
At first by crude means, which will gradually be refined. These
immediate crude means will hold their attention at the start.
That is why in the "theater of cruelty" the spectator is in
the center and the spectacle surrounds him.
In this spectacle the sonorisation is constant: sounds, noises,
cries are chosen first for their vibratory quality, then for what
they represent.
Among these gradually refined means light is interposed in
its turn. Light which is not created merely to add color or to
brighten, and which brings its power, influence, suggestions with
it. And the light of a green cavern does not sensually dispose the
organism like the light of a windy day.
After sound and light there is action, and the dynamism of
action: here the theater, far from copying life, puts itself
whenever possible in communication with pure forces. And
whether you accept or deny them, there is nevertheless a way of
speaking which gives the name of "forces" to whatever brings to
birth images of energy in the unconscious, and gratuitous crime
on the surface.
A violent and concentrated action is a kind of lyricism: it
summons up supernatural images, a bloodstream of images, a
bleeding spurt of images in the poet's head and in the spectator's
as well.
Whatever the conflicts that haunt the mind of a given period, I
defy any spectator to whom such violent scenes will have
transferred their blood, who will have felt in himself the
transit of a superior action, who will have seen the extraordinary
and essential movements of his thought illuminated in
extraordinary deeds--the violence and blood having been placed
at the service of the violence of the thought--I defy that spectator
to give himself up, once outside the theater, to ideas of war, riot,
and blatant murder.
So expressed, this idea seems dangerous and sophomoric. It
will be claimed that example breeds example, that if the attitude
of cure induces cure, the attitude of murder will induce murder.
Everything depends upon the manner and the purity with which
the thing is done. There is a risk. But let it not be forgotten that
though a theatrical gesture is violent, it is disinterested; and that
the theater teaches precisely the uselessness of the action which,
once done, is not to be done, and the superior use of the state
unused by the action and which, restored, produces a purification.
I propose then a theater in which violent physical images
ANTONIN ARTAUD 83
crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the
theater as by a whirlwind of higher forces.
A theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the
extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces,
and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of
redirection. A theater that induces trance, as the dances of
Dervishes induce trance, and that addresses itself to the organism
by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain
tribal music cures which we admire on records but are incapable
of originating among ourselves.
There is a risk involved, but in the present circumstances I
believe it is a risk worth running. I do not believe we have
managed to revitalize the world we live in, and I do not believe it
is worth the trouble of clinging to; but I do propose something to
get us out of our marasmus, instead of continuing to complain
about it, and about the boredom, inertia, and stupidity of
everything.
VII. The Theater and Cruelty
An idea of the theater has been lost. And as long as the theater
limits itself to showing us intimate scenes from the lives of a few
puppets, transforming the public into Peeping Toms, it is no
wonder the elite abandon it and the great public looks to the
movies, the music hall or the circus for violent satisfactions,
whose intentions do not deceive them.
At the point of deterioration which our sensibility has reached,
it is certain that we need above all a theater that wakes us up:
nerves and heart.
The misdeeds of the psychological theater descended from
Racine have unaccustomed us to that immediate and violent
action which the theater should possess. Movies in their turn,
murdering us with second-hand reproductions which, filtered
through machines, cannot unite with our sensibility, have
maintained us for ten years in an ineffectual torpor, in which all
our faculties appear to be foundering.
In the anguished, catastrophic period we live in, we feel an
urgent need for a theater which events do not exceed, whose
resonance is deep within us, dominating the instability of the
times.
Our long habit of seeking diversion has made us forget the
idea of a serious theater, which, overturning all our precon-
ceptions, inspires us with the fiery magnetism of its images
84
ANTONIN ARTAUD 85
and acts upon us like a spiritual therapeutics whose touch can
never be forgotten. .
Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme
action, pushed beyond all limits, that theater must be rebuilt.
Imbued with the idea that the public thinks first of all with its
senses and that to address oneself first to its understanding as the
ordinary psychological theater does is absurd, the Theater of
Cruelty proposes to resort to a mass spectacle; to seek in the
agitation of tremendous masses, convulsed and hurled against
each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all
too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets.
The theater must give us everything that is in crime, love, war,
or madness, if it wants to recover its necessity.
Everyday love, personal ambition, struggles for status, all have
value only in proportion to their relation to the terrible lyricism of
the Myths to which the great mass of men have assented.
This is why we shall try to concentrate, around famous
personages, atrocious crimes, superhuman devotions, a drama
which, without resorting to the defunct images of the old Myths,
shows that it can extract the forces which struggle within them.
In a word, we believe that there are living forces in what is
called poetry and that the image of a crime presented in the
requisite theatrical conditions is something infinitely more
terrible for the spirit than that same crime when actually
committed.
We want to make out of the theater a believable reality which
gives the heart and the senses that kind of concrete bite which all
true sensation requires. In the same way that our dreams have an
effect upon us and reality has an effect
upon our dreams, so we believe that the images of thought can be
identified with a dream which will be efficacious to the degree
that it can be projected with the necessary violence. And the
public will believe in the theater's dreams on condition that it take
them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality; on
condition that they allow the public to liberate within itself the
magical liberties of dreams which it can only recognize when they
are imprinted with terror and cruelty.
Hence this appeal to cruelty and terror, though on a vast scale,
whose range probes our entire vitality, confronts us with all our
possibilities.
It is in order to attack the spectator's sensibility on all sides that
we advocate a revolving spectacle which, instead of making the
stage and auditorium two closed worlds, without possible
communication, spreads its visual and sonorous outbursts over the
entire mass of the spectators.
Also, departing from the sphere of analyzable passions, we
intend to make use of the actor's lyric qualities to manifest
external forces, and by this means to cause the whole of nature to
re-enter the theater in its restored form.
However vast this program may be, it does not exceed the
theater itself, which appears to us, all in all, to identify itself with
the forces of ancient magic.
Practically speaking, we want to resuscitate an idea of total
spectacle by which the theater would recover from the cinema,
the music hall, the circus, and from life itself what has always
belonged to it. The separation between the analytic theater and the
plastic world seems to us a stupidity. One does not separate the
mind from the body nor the senses from the intelligence,
especially in a domain where the endlessly renewed fatigue of the
organs requires intense and sudden shocks to revive our
understanding.
Thus, on the one hand, the mass and extent of a spectacle
ANTONIN ARTAUD 87
addressed to the entire organism; on the other, an intensive
mobilization of objects, gestures, and signs, used in a new spirit.
The reduced role given to the understanding leads to an energetic
compression of the text; the active role given to obscure poetic
emotion necessitates concrete signs. Words say little to the mind;
extent and objects speak; new images speak, even new images
made with words. But space thundering with images and
crammed with sounds speaks too, if one knows how to
intersperse from time to time a sufficient extent of space stocked
with silence and immobility.
On this principle we envisage producing a spectacle where
these means of direct action are used in their totality; a spectacle
unafraid of going as far as necessary in the exploration of our
nervous sensibility, of which the rhythms, sounds, words,
resonances, and twitterings, and their united quality and
surprising mixtures belong to a technique which must not be
divulged.
The images in certain paintings by Grunewald or Hieronymus
Bosch tell enough about what a spectacle can be in which, as in
the brain of some saint, the objects of external nature will appear
as temptations.
It is in this spectacle of a temptation from which life has
everything to lose and the mind everything to gain that the theater
must recover its true signification.
Elsewhere we have given a program which will allow the
means of pure staging, found on the spot, to be organized around
historic or cosmic themes, familiar to all.
And we insist on the fact that the first spectacle of the Theater
of Cruelty will turn upon the preoccupations of the great mass of
men, preoccupations much more pressing and disquieting than
those of any individual whatsoever.
It is a matter of knowing whether now, in Paris, before the
cataclysms which are at our door descend upon us, sufficient
means of production, financial or otherwise, can be
found to permit such a theater to be brought to life-it is bound to
in any case, because it is the future. Or whether a little real blood
will be needed, right away, in order to manifest this cruelty.
May 1933.
VIII. The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)
We cannot go on prostituting the idea of theater whose only value

is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger.
Put in this way, the question of the theater ought to arouse

general attention, the implication being that theater, through its
physical aspect, since it requires expression in space (the only
real expression, in fact), allows the magical means of art and
speech to be exercised organically and altogether, like renewed
exorcisms. The upshot of all this is that theater will not be given
its specific powers of action until it is given its language.
That is to say: instead of continuing to rely upon texts
considered definitive and sacred, it is essential to put an end to the
subjugation of the theater to the text, and to recover the notion of
a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought.
This language cannot be defined except by its possibilities for
dynamic expression in space as opposed to the expressive
possibilities of spoken dialogue. And what the theater can still
take over from speech are its possibilities for extension beyond
words, for development in space, for dissociative and vibratory
action upon the sensibility. This is the hour of
89
intonations, of a word's particular pronunciation. Here too
intervenes (besides the auditory language of sounds) the visual
language of objects, movements, attitudes, and gestures, but on
condition that their meanings, their physiognomies, their
combinations be carried to the point of becoming signs, making a
kind of alphabet out of these signs. Once aware of this language in
space, language of sounds, cries, lights, onomatopoeia, the theater
must organize it into veritable hieroglyphs, with the help of
characters and objects, and make use of their symbolism and
interconnections in relation to all organs and on all levels.
The question, then, for the theater, is [0 create a metaphysics of
speech, gesture, and expression, in order to rescue it from its
servitude to psychology and "human interest." But all this can be
of no use unless behind such an effort there is some kind of real
metaphysical inclination, an appeal to certain unhabitual ideas,
which by their very nature cannot be limited or even formally
depicted. These ideas which touch on Creation, Becoming, and
Chaos, are all of a cosmic order and furnish a primary notion of a
domain from which the theater is now entirely alien. They are able
to create a kind of passionate equation between Man, Society,
Nature, and Objects.
It is not, moreover, a question of bringing metaphysical ideas
directly onto the stage, but of creating what you might call
temptations, indraughts of air around these ideas. And humor with
its anarchy, poetry with its symbolism and its
images, furnish a basic notion of ways to channel the temptation
of these ideas.
We must speak now about the uniquely material side of this
language--that is, about all the ways and means it has of acting
upon the sensibility.
It would be meaningless to say that it includes music,
dance, pantomime, or mimicry. Obviously it uses movement,
ANTONIN ARTAUD 91
harmonies, rhythms, but only to the point that they can concur in a
sort of central expression without advantage for any one particular
art. This does not at all mean that it does not use ordinary actions,
ordinary passions, but like a springboard uses them in the same
way that HUMOR AS DESTRUCTION can serve to reconcile the
corrosive nature of laughter to the habits of reason.
But by an altogether Oriental means of expression, this
objective and concrete language of the theater can fascinate and
ensnare the organs. It flows into the sensibility. Abandoning
Occidental usages of speech, it turns words into incantations. It
extends the voice. It utilizes the vibrations and qualities of the
voice. It wildly tramples rhythms underfoot. It pile-drives sounds.
It seeks to exalt, to benumb, to charm, to arrest the sensibility. It
liberates a new lyricism of gesture which, by its precipitation or its
amplitude in the air, ends by surpassing the lyricism of words. It
ultimately breaks away from the intellectual subjugation of the
language, by convey
ing the sense of a new and deeper intellectuality which hides itself
beneath the gestures and signs, raised to the dignity of particular
exorcisms.
For all this magnetism, all this poetry, and all these direct
means of spellbinding would be nothing if they were not used to
put the spirit physically on the track of something else, if the true
theater could not give us the sense of a creation of which we
possess only one face, but which is completed on other levels.
And it is of little importance whether these other levels are
really conquered by the mind or not, i.e., by the intelligence; it
would diminish them, and that has neither interest nor sense.
What is important is that, by positive means, the sensitivity is put
in a state of deepened and keener perception. and this is the very
object of the magic and the rites of which the theater is only a
reflection.
TECHNIQUE
It is a question then of making the theater, in the proper sense
of the word, a function; something as localized and as precise as
the circulation of the blood in the arteries or the apparently
chaotic development of dream images in the brain, and this is to
be accomplished by a thorough involvement, a genuine
enslavement of the attention.
The theater will never find itself again--i.e., constitute a means
of true illusion--except by furnishing the spectator with the
truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his
erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of
life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not
counterfeit and illusory, but interior.
In other terms, the theater must pursue by all its means a
reassertion not only of all the aspects of the objective and
descriptive external world, but or the internal world, that is, of
man considered metaphysically. It is only thus, we believe, that
we shall be able to speak again in the theater about the rights of
the imagination. Neither humor, nor poetry, nor imagination
means anything unless, by an anarchistic destruction generating a
prodigious flight of forms which will constitute the whole
spectacle, they succeed in organically reinvolving man, his ideas
about reality, and his poetic place in reality.
To consider the theater as a second-hand psychological or
moral function, and to believe that dreams themselves have only a
substitute function, is to diminish the profound poetic bearing of
dreams as well as of the theater. If the theater, like dreams, is
bloody and inhuman, it is, more than just that, to manifest and
unforgettably root within us the idea of a perpetual conflict, a
spasm in which life is continually lacerated,
in which everything in creation rises up and exerts itself against
our appointed rank; it is in order to perpetuate in a concrete and
immediate way the metaphysical ideas of certain
ANTONIN ARTAUD 93
Fables whose very atrocity and energy suffice to show their origin
and continuity in essential principles.
This being so, one sees that, by its proximity to principles
which transfer their energy to it poetically, this naked language of
the theater (not a virtual but a real language) must permit, by its
use of man's nervous magnetism, the transgression of the ordinary
limits of art and speech, in order to realize actively, that is to say
magically, in real terms, a kind of total creation in which man
must reassume his place between dream and events.
THE THEMES
It is not a matter of boring the public to death with tran-
scendent cosmic preoccupations. That there may be profound
keys to thought and action with which to interpret the whole
spectacle, does not in general concern the spectator, who is
simply not interested. But still they must be there; and that
concerns us.
.
THE SPECTACLE: Every spectacle will contain a physical
and objective element, perceptible to all. Cries, groans, appa-
ritions, surprises, theatricalities of all kinds, magic beauty of
costumes taken from certain ritual models; resplendent lighting,
incantational beauty of voices, the charms of harmony, rare notes
of music, colors of objects, physical rhythm of movements whose
crescendo and decrescendo will accord exactly with the pulsation
of movements familiar to everyone, concrete appearances of new
and surprising objects, masks, effigies yards high, sudden
changes of light, the physical action of light which arouses
sensations of heat and cold, etc.
THE MISE EN SCENE: The typical language of the theater
will be constituted around the mise en scene considered not
simply as the degree of refraction of a text upon the stage, but as
the point of departure for all theatrical creation. And it is in the
use and handling of this language that the old duality between
author and director will be dissolved, replaced by a sort of
unique Creator upon whom will devolve the double
responsibility of the spectacle and the plot.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE STAGE: It is not a question of
suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approxi-
mately the importance they have in dreams.
Meanwhile new means of recording this language must be
found, whether these means belong to musical transcription or to
some kind of code.
As for ordinary objects, or even the human body, raised to the
dignity of signs, it is evident that one can draw one's inspiration
from hieroglyphic characters, not only in order to record these
signs in a readable fashion which permits them to be
reproduced at will, but in order to compose on the stage precise
and immediately readable symbols.
On the other hand, this code language and musical trans-
cription will be valuable as a means of transcribing voices.
Since it is fundamental to this language to make a particular
use of intonations, these intonations will constitute a kind of
harmonic balance, a secondary deformation of speech which
must be reproducible at will.
Similarly the ten thousand and one expressions of the face
caught in the form of masks can be labeled and catalogued, so
they may eventually participate directly and symbolically
in this concrete language of the stage, independently of their
particular psychological use.
Moreover, these symbolical gestures, masks, and attitudes,
these individual or group movements whose innumerable
meanings constitute an important part of the concrete language
of the theater, evocative gestures, emotive or arbitrary attitudes,
excited pounding out of rhythms and sounds, will
be doubled, will be multiplied by reflections, as it were, of
ANTONIN ARTAUD 95
the gestures and attitudes consisting of the mass of all the
impulsive gestures, all the abortive attitudes, all the lapses of
mind and tongue, by which are revealed what might be called the
impotences of speech, and in which is a prodigious wealth of
expressions, to which we shall not fail to have recourse on
occasion.
There is, besides, a concrete idea of music in which the sounds
make their entrance like characters, where harmonies are
coupled together and lose themselves in the precise entrances of
words.
From one means of expression to another, correspondences
and levels of development are created---even light can have a
precise intellectual meaning.
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS: They will be treated as objects
and as part of the set.
Also, the need to act directly and profoundly upon the
sensibility through the organs invites research, from the point of
view of sound, into qualities and vibrations of absolutely new
sounds, qualities which present-day musical instruments do not
possess and which require the revival of ancient and forgotten
instruments or the invention of new ones. Research is also
required, apart from music, into instruments and appliances
which, based upon special combinations or new alloys of metal,
can attain a new range and compass, producing sounds or noises
that are unbearably piercing.
LIGHTS, LIGHTING: The lighting equipment now in use in
theaters is no longer adequate. The particular action of light upon
the mind, the effects of all kinds of luminous vibration must be
investigated, along with new ways of spreading the light in waves,
in sheets, in fusillades of fiery arrows. The color gamut of the
equipment now in use is to be revised from beginning to end. In
order to produce the qualities of particular musical tones, light
must recover an element of thinness, density, and opaqueness,
with a view to producing the sensations of heat, cold, anger, fear,
etc.
COSTUMES: Where costumes are concerned, modern dress will be
avoided as much as possible without at the same time
assuming a uniform theatrical costuming that would be the
same for every play--not from a fetishist and superstitious
reverence for the past, but because it seems absolutely evident
that certain age-old costumes, of ritual intent, though they existed
at a given moment of time, preserve a beauty and a revelational
appearance from their closeness to the traditions that gave them
birth.
THE STAGE--THE AUDITORIUM: We abolish the stage and
the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without
partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theater of
the action. A direct communication will be re-established between
the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the
spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of
the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it. This
envelopment results, in part, from the very configuration of the
room itself.
Thus, abandoning the architecture of present-day theaters, we
shall take some hangar or barn, which we shall have re-
constructed according to processes which have culminated in the
architecture of certain churches or holy places, and of certain
temples in Tibet.
In the interior of this construction special proportions of height
and depth will prevail. The hall will be enclosed by four walls,
without any kind of ornament, and the public will be seated in the
middle of the room, on the ground floor, on mobile chairs which
will allow them to follow the spectacle which will take place all
around them. In effect, the absence of a stage in the usual sense of
the word will provide for the deployment of the action in the four
corners of the room. Particular positions will be reserved for
actors and action at the four cardinal points of the room. The
scenes will be played in front of whitewashed wall-backgrounds
designed to absorb the light. In addition, galleries overhead will
run
ANTONIN ARTAUD 97
around the periphery of the hall as in certain primitive paintings.
These galleries will permit the actors, whenever the action makes
it necessary, to be pursued from one point in the room to another,
and the action to be deployed on all levels and in all perspectives
of height and depth. A cry uttered at one end of the room can be
transmitted from mouth to mouth with amplifications and
successive modulations all the way to the other. The action will
unfold, will extend its trajectory from level to level, point to
point; paroxysms will suddenly burst forth, will flare up like fires
in different spots. And to speak of the spectacle's character as
true illusion or of the direct and immediate influence of the
action on the
spectator will not be hollow words. For this diffusion of action
over an immense space will oblige the lighting of a scene and the
varied lighting of a performance to fall upon
the public as much as upon the actors--and to the several
simultaneous actions or several phases of an identical action in
which the characters, swarming over each other like bees, will
endure all the onslaughts of the situations and the external
assaults of the tempestuous elements, will correspond the physical
means of lighting, of producing thunder or wind, whose
repercussions the spectator will undergo.
However, a central position will be reserved which, without
serving, properly speaking, as a stage, will permit the bulk of the
action to be concentrated and brought to a climax whenever
necessary.
OBJECTS-MASKS-ACCESSORIES: Manikins, enormous
masks, objects of strange proportions will appear with the same
sanction as verbal images, will enforce the concrete
aspect of every image and every expression--with the corollary
that all objects requiring a stereotyped physical representation
will be discarded or disguised.
THE SET: There will not be any set. This function will be
sufficiently undertaken by hieroglyphic characters, ritual cos-
tumes, manikins ten feet high representing the beard of King
Lear in the storm, musical instruments tall as men, objects of
unknown shape and purpose.
IMMEDIACY: But, people will say, a theater so divorced
from life, from facts, from immediate interests. . . . From the
present and its events, yes! From whatever preoccupations have
any of that profundity which is the prerogative of some men, no!
In the Zohar, the story of Rabbi Simeon who burns like fire is as
immediate as fire itself.
WORKS: We shall not act a written play, but we shall make
attempts at direct staging, around themes, facts, or known works.
The very nature and disposition of the room suggest this
treatment, and there is no theme, however vast, that can be denied
us.
SPECTACLE: There is an idea of integral spectacles which
must be regenerated. The problem is to make space speak, to feed
and furnish it; like mines laid in a wall of rock which all of a
sudden turns into geysers and bouquets of stone.
THE ACTOR: The actor is both an element of first impor-
tance, since it is upon the effectiveness of his work that the
success of the spectacle depends, and a kind of passive and
neutral element, since he is rigorously denied all personal
initiative. It is a domain in which there is no precise rule,' and
between the actor of whom is required the mere quality of a sob
and the actor who must deliver an oration with all
his personal qualities of persuasiveness, there is the whole
margin which separates a man from an instrument.
THE INTERPRETATION: The spectacle will be calculated
from one end to the other, like a code (un langage). Thus there
will be no lost movements, all movements will obey a rhythm;
and each character being merely a type, his gesticulation,
physiognomy, and costume will appear like so many rays of light.
THE CINEMA: To the crude visualization of what is, the
theater through poetry opposes images of what is not. However,
from the point of view of action, one cannot compare
ANTONIN ARTAUD 99
a cinematic image which, however poetic it may be, is limited by
the film, to a theatrical image which obeys all the exigencies of
life.
CRUELTY: Without an element of cruelty at the root of every
spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of
degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made
to re-enter our minds.
THE PUBLIC: First of all this theater must exist.
THE PROGRAM: We shall stage, without regard for text:
1. An adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare,
a work entirely consistent with our present troubled state of mind,
whether one of the apocryphal plays of Shakespeare, such as
Arden of Feversham, or an entirely different play from the same
period.
2. A play of extreme poetic freedom by Leon-Paul Fargue.
3. An extract from the Zohar: The Story of Rabbi Simeon,
which has the ever present violence and force of a conflagration.
4. The story of Bluebeard reconstructed according to the
historical records and with a new idea of eroticism and cruelty.
5. The Fall of Jerusalem, according to the Bible and history,'
with the blood-red color that trickles from it and the people's
feeling of abandon and panic visible even in the light; and on the
other hand the metaphysical disputes of the prophets, the frightful
intellectual agitation they create
and the repercussions of which physically affect the King, the
Temple, the People, and Events themselves.
6. A Tale by the Marquis de Sade, in which the eroticism will
be transposed, allegorically mounted and figured, to create a
violent exteriorization of cruelty, and a dissimulation of the
remainder.
7. One or more romantic melodramas in which the im-
probability will become an active and concrete element of
poetry.
8. Buchner's Wozzek, in a spirit of reaction against our
principles and as an example of what can be drawn from a
formal text in terms of the stage.
9. Works from the Elizabethan theater stripped of their text
and retaining only the accouterments of period, situations,
characters, and action.
IX. Letters on Cruelty
FIRST LETTER
To J. P. Paris, September 13, 1932
Dear friend,
I cannot give you particulars about my Manifesto that would
risk emasculating its point. All I can do is to comment, for the
time being, upon my title "Theater of Cruelty" and try to justify
its choice.
This Cruelty is a matter of neither sadism nor bloodshed, at
least not in any exclusive way.
I do not systematically cultivate horror. The word "cruelty"
must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical
sense that it is customarily given. And I claim, in doing this, the
right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the
armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck, in
short to return to the etymological origins of speech which, in the
midst of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete element.
One can very well imagine a pure cruelty, without bodily
laceration. And philosophically speaking what indeed is cruelty?
From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigor,
implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute
determination.
101
The most current philosophical determinism is, from the
point of view of our existence, an image of cruelty.
It is a mistake to give the word 'cruelty' a meaning of merciless
bloodshed and disinterested, gratuitous pursuit of physical
suffering. The Ethiopian Ras who carts off vanquished princes
and makes them his slaves does not do so out of a desperate love
of blood. Cruelty is not synonymous with bloodshed, martyred
flesh, crucified enemies. This identification of cruelty with
tortured victims is a very minor aspect of the question. In the
practice of cruelty there is a kind of higher determinism, to which
the executioner-tormenter himself is subjected and which he must
be determined to endure when the time comes. Cruelty is above
all lucid, a kind of rigid control and submission to necessity.
There is no cruelty without consciousness and without the
application of consciousness. It is consciousness that gives to the
exercise of every act of life its blood-red color, its cruel nuance,
since it is understood that life is always someone's death.
SECOND
LETTER
To J. P. Paris, November 14, 1932
Dear friend,
Cruelty was not tacked onto my thinking; it has always been at
home there: but I had to become conscious of it. I employ the
word 'cruelty' in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor
and implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living
whirlwind that devours the darkness, in the sense of that pain
apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue;
good is desired, it is the consequence of an act; evil is permanent.
When the hidden god creates, he obeys the cruel necessity of
creation which has been imposed on himself by himself, and he
cannot not create, hence not admit into
ANTONIN ARTAUD 103
the center of the self-willed whirlwind a kernel of evil ever more
condensed, and ever more consumed. And theater in the sense of
continuous creation, a wholly magical action, obeys this necessity.
A play in which there would not be this will, this blind appetite
for life capable of overriding everything, visible in each gesture
and each act and in the transcendent aspect of the story, would be
a useless and unfulfilled play.
THIRD LETTER
To M. R. de R Paris, November 16, 1932
Dear friend,
I confess to you I neither understand nor admit the objections
that have been made against my title. For it seems to me that
creation and life itself are defined only by a kind of rigor, hence a
fundamental cruelty, which leads things to their ineluctable end at
whatever cost.
Effort is a cruelty, existence through effort is a cruelty. Rising
from his repose and extending himself into being, Brahma suffers,
with a suffering that yields joyous harmonics perhaps, but which
at the ultimate extremity of the curve can only be expressed by a
terrible crushing and grinding.
There is in life's flame, life's appetite, life's irrational impulsion,
a kind of initial perversity: the desire characteristic of Eros is
cruelty since it feeds upon contingencies; death is cruelty,
resurrection is cruelty, transfiguration is cruelty, since nowhere in
a circular and closed world is there room for true death, since
ascension is a rending, since closed space is fed with lives, and
each stronger life tramples down the others, consuming them in a
massacre which is a transfiguration and
a bliss. In the manifested world, metaphysically speaking, evil is
the permanent law, and what is good is an effort and already one
more cruelty added to the other.
Not to understand this is not to understand metaphysical ideas.
And after this let no one come to tell me my title is too limited. It
is cruelty that cements matter together, cruelty that molds the
features of the created world. Good is always upon the outer face,
but the face within is evil. Evil which will eventually be reduced,
but at the supreme instant when everything that was form will be
on the point of returning to chaos.
X. Letters on Language
FIRST LETTER
To M. B. C. Paris, September 15, 1931
Sir,
You state in an article on the theater and the mise en scene that
"in considering the mise en scene as an autonomous art one risks
committing still worse errors" and that "the presentation, the
spectacular aspect of a dramatic work should not be determined
in total and cavalier independence."
And you say in addition that these are elementary truths.
You are perfectly right in considering the mise en scene as
only a subservient and minor art to which even those who employ
it with the maximum of independence deny all fundamental
originality. So long as the mise en scene remains, even in the
minds of the boldest directors, a simple means of presentation, an
accessory mode of expressing the work, a sort of spectacular
intermediary with no significance of its own, it will be valuable
only to the degree it succeeds in hiding itself behind the works it
is pretending to serve. And this will continue as long as the major
interest in a performed work is in its text, as long as literature
takes precedence over the kind of performance improperly called
spectacle, with
105
everything pejorative, accessory, ephemeral, and external that
that term carries with it.
Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must
precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and
autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize
what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all
other fixed and written means.
We can perfectly well continue to conceive of a theater based
upon the authority of the text, and on a text more and more
wordy, diffuse, and boring, to which the esthetics of the stage
would be subject.
But this conception of theater, which consists of having
people sit on a certain number of straight-backed or overstuffed
chairs placed in a row and tell each other stories, however
marvelous, is, if not the absolute negation of theater --which does
not absolutely require movement in order to be what it should--
certainly its perversion.
For the theater to become an essentially psychological
matter, the intellectual alchemy of feelings, and for the pinnacle of
art in the dramatic medium to consist finally in a certain ideal of
silence and immobility, is nothing but the perversion on the stage
of the idea of concentration.
This concentration in playing, employed among so many
modes of expression by the Japanese for example, is valuable as
only one means among many others. And to make a goal out of it
on the stage is to abstain from making use of the stage, like
someone who, with the pyramids for burying the
corpse of a pharaoh, used the pretext that the pharaoh's corpse
occupied only a niche, and had the pyramids blown up.
He would have blown up at the same time the whole magical
and philosophical system for which the niche was only the point
of departure and the corpse the condition.
On the other hand, the director who takes pains with his set to
the detriment of the text is wrong, though perhaps less
ANTONIN ARTAUD 107
wrong than the critic who condemns his single-minded concern
for the mise en scene.
For by taking pains with the mise en scene, which in a play is
the truly and specifically theatrical part of the spectacle, the
director hews to theater's true line, which is a matter of
production. But both parties are playing with words; for if the
term mise en scene has taken on, through usage, this deprecatory
sense, it is a result of our European conception of the theater
which gives precedence to spoken language over all other means
of expression.
It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is
the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which
is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens,
the language of words may have to give way before a language of
signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most
immediate impact upon us.
Considered in this light, the objective work of the mise en
scene assumes a kind of intellectual dignity from the effacement
of words behind gestures and from the fact that the esthetic,
plastic part of theater drops its role of decorative intermediary in
order to become, in the proper sense of the word, a directly
communicative language.
In other terms, if it is true that in a play made to be spoken, the
director is wrong to wander off into stage effects more or less
cleverly lit, interplay of groups, muted movements, all of which
could be called epidermal effects which merely inflate the text, he
is, in doing this, still closer to the concrete reality
of theater than the author who might have confined himself to his
text without recourse to the stage, whose spatial necessities seem
to escape him.
Someone may point out here the high dramatic value of all the
great tragedians, among whom it is certainly the literary or at any
rate the spoken aspect that seems to dominate.
I shall answer that if we are clearly so incapable today of
giving an idea of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare that is
worthy of them, it is probably because we have lost the sense of
their theater's physics. It is because the directly human and active
aspect of their way of speaking and moving, their whole scenic
rhythm, escapes us. An aspect that ought to have as much if not
more importance than the admirable spoken dissection of their
heroes' psychology.
By this aspect, by means of this precise gesticulation which
modifies itself through history we can rediscover the deep
humanity of their theater.
But even if this physics really existed, I would still assert that
none of these great tragedians is the theater itself, which is a
matter of scenic materialization and which lives only by
materialization. Let it be said, if one wishes, that theater is an
inferior art--take a look around!--but theater resides in a certain
way of furnishing and animating the air of the stage, by a
conflagration of feelings and human sensations at a given point,
creating situations that are expressed in concrete gestures.
Furthermore these concrete gestures must have an efficacy
strong enough to make us forget the very necessity of speech.
Then if spoken language still exists it must be only as a response,
a relay stage of racing space; and the cement of gestures must by
its human efficacy achieve the value of a true abstraction.
In a word, the theater must become a sort of experimental
demonstration of the profound unity of the concrete and the
abstract.
For beside the culture of words there is the culture of gestures.
There are other languages in the world besides our Occidental
language which has decided in favor of the despoiling and
dessication of ideas, presenting them inert and unable to stir up in
their course a whole system of natural analogies, as
in Oriental languages.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 109
The theater still remains the most active and efficient site of
passage for those immense analogical disturbances in which ideas
are arrested in flight at some point in their transmutation into the
abstract.
There can be no complete theater which does not take account
of these cartilaginous transformations of ideas; which does not
add to our fully known feelings the expression of states of mind
belonging to the half-conscious realm, which the suggestions of
gestures will always express more adequately than the precise
localized meanings of words.
It seems, in brief, that the highest possible idea of the theater is
one that reconciles us philosophically with Becoming, suggesting
to us through all sorts of objective situations the furtive idea of
the passage and transmutation of ideas into things, much more
than the transformation and stumbling of feelings into words.
It seems also that it was with just such an intention that the
theater was created, to include man and his appetites only to the
degree that he is magnetically confronted with his destiny. Not to
submit to it, but to measure himself against it.
SECOND LETTER
Ta J. P. Paris, September 28, 1932
Dear friend,
I do not believe that if you had once read my Manifesto you
could persevere in your objections, so either you have not read it
or you have read it badly. My plays have nothing to do with
Copeau's improvisations. However thoroughly they are immersed
in the concrete and external, however rooted in free nature and
not in the narrow chambers of the brain, they are not, for all that,
left to the caprice of the wild and thoughtless inspiration of the
actor, especially the modern
actor who, once cut off from the text, plunges in without any idea
of what he is doing. I would not care to leave the fate of my plays
and of the theater to that kind of chance. No.
Here is what is really going to happen. It is simply a matter of
changing the point of departure of artistic creation and of
overturning the customary laws of the theater. It is a matter of
substituting for the spoken language a different language of
nature, whose expressive possibilities will be equal to verbal
language, but whose source will be tapped at a point still deeper,
more remote from thought.
The grammar of this new language is still to be found. Gesture
is its material and its wits; and, if you will, its alpha and omega. It
springs from the NECESSITY of speech more than from speech
already formed. But finding an impasse in speech, it returns
spontaneously to gesture. In passing, it touches upon some of the
physical laws of human expression. It is immersed in necessity. It
retraces poetically the path that has culminated in the creation of
language. But with a manifold awareness of the worlds set in
motion by the language of speech, which it revives in all their
aspects. It brings again into the light all the relations fixed and
enclosed in the strata of the human syllable, which has killed
them by confining them. All the operations through which the
word has passed in order to come to stand for that fiery Light-
Bringer, whose Father Fire guards us like a shield in the form of
Jupiter, the Latin contraction of Zeus-Pater--all these operations
by means of cries, onomatopoeia, signs, attitudes, and by slow,
copious, impassioned modulations of tension, level by level, term
by term-these it recreates. For I make it my principle that words
do not mean everything and that by their nature and defining
character, fixed once and for all, they arrest and paralyze thought
instead of permitting it and fostering its development. And by
development I mean actual extended concrete qualities, so long as
we are in an extended concrete world. The language of the theater
aims then at encompassing and utilizing
ANTONIN ARTAUD 111
extension, that is to say space, and by utilizing it, to make it speak:
I deal with objects--the data of extension --like images, like words,
bringing them together and making them respond to each other
according to laws of symbolism and living analogies: eternal laws,
those of all poetry and all viable language, and, among other
things, of Chinese ideograms and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Hence, far from restricting the possibilities of theater and
language, on the pretext that I will not perform written plays, I
extend the language of the stage and multiply its possibilities.
I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am
trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its
essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have
been forgotten. When I say I will perform no written play, I mean
that I will perform no play based on writing and speech, that in the
spectacles I produce there will be a preponderant physical share
which could not be captured and written down in the customary
language of words, and that even the spoken and written portions
will be spoken and written in a new sense.
Theater which is the reverse of what is practiced here, i.e., in
Europe, or better, in the Occident, will no longer be based on
dialogue; and dialogue itself, the little that will remain, will
not be written out and fixed a priori, but will be put on the stage,
created on the stage, in correlation with the requirements of
attitudes, signs, movements and objects. But this whole method of
feeling one's way objectively among one's materials, in which
Speech will appear as a necessity, as the result of a series of
compressions, collisions, scenic frictions, evolutions of all kinds
(thus the theater will become once more an authentic living
operation, it will maintain that sort of emotional pulsation without
which art is gratuitous)--all these gropings, researches, and shocks
will culminate nevertheless in a work written down, fixed in its
least details, and recorded by new means of notation. The
composition, the
creation, instead of being made in the brain of an author, will be
made in nature itself, in real space, and the final result will be as
strict and as calculated as that of any written work whatsoever,
with an immense objective richness as well.
P.S.--The author must discover and assume what belongs to the

mise en scene as well as what belongs to the author, and become a
director himself in a way that will put a stop to the absurd duality
existing between director and author.
An author who does not handle the scenic material directly and
who does not move about the stage in orienting himself and
making the power of his orientation serve the spectacle, has in
reality betrayed his mission. And it is right for the actor to replace
him. But so much the worse for the theater which is forced to
suffer this usurpation.
Theatrical time, which is based upon breath, sometimes rushes
by in great, consciously willed exhalations, sometimes contracts
and attenuates to a prolonged feminine inhalation. An arrested
gesture sets off a frantic complex seething, and this gesture bears
within itself the magic of its evocation.
But though it may please us to offer suggestions concerning
the energetic and animated life of the theater, we would not care
to lay down laws.
Most certainly the human breath has principles which are all
based upon innumerable. combinations of the cabalistic
ternaries. There are six principal ternaries but innumerable
combinations, since it is from them that all life issues. And the
theater is precisely the place where this magic respiration is
reproduced at will. If the fixation of a major gesture requires
around it a sharp and rapid breathing, this same exaggerated
breathing can come to make its waves break slowly around a
fixed gesture. There are abstract principles but no concrete plastic
law; the only law is the poetic energy that proceeds from the
stifled silence to the headlong representation of a
ANTONIN ARTAUD 113
spasm, and from individual speech mezzo voce to the weighty and
resonant storm of a chorus slowly swelling its volume.
But the important thing is to create stages and perspectives
from one language to the other. The secret of theater in space is
dissonance, dispersion of timbres, and the dialectic discontinuity
of expression.
The person who has an idea of what this language is will be
able to understand us. We write only for him. We give elsewhere
some supplementary particulars which complete the first
Manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty.
Everything essential having been said in the first Manifesto,
the second aims only at specifying certain points. It gives a
workable definition of Cruelty and offers a description of scenic
space. It remains to be seen what we make of it.
THIRD LE TTER
To J. Po Paris, November 9, 1932
Dear friend,
Objections have been made to you and to me against the
Manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty, some having to do with
cruelty, whose function in my theater seems unclear, at least as an
essential, determining element; others having to do with the
theater as I conceive it.
As for the first objection, those who make it are right, not in
relation to cruelty, nor in relation to the theater, but in relation to
the place this cruelty occupies in my theater. I should have
specified the very particular use I make of this word, and said that
I employ it not in an episodic, accessory sense, out of a taste for
sadism and perversion of mind, out of love of sensationalism and
unhealthy attitudes, hence not at all in a circumstantial sense; it is
not at all a matter of vicious cruelty, cruelty bursting with
perverse appetites and expressing
itself in bloody gestures, sickly excrescences upon an already
contaminated flesh, but on the contrary, a pure and detached
feeling, a veritable movement of the mind based on the gestures
of life itself; the idea being that life, metaphysically speaking,
because it admits extension, thickness, heaviness, and matter,
admits, as a direct consequence, evil and all that is inherent in
evil, space, extension and matter. All this culminates in
consciousness and torment, and in consciousness in torment. Life
cannot help exercising some blind rigor that carries with it all its
conditions, otherwise it would not be life; but this rigor, this life
that exceeds all bounds and is exercised in the torture and
trampling down of everything, this pure implacable feeling is
what cruelty is.
I have therefore said "cruelty" as I might have said "life" or
"necessity," because I want to indicate especially that for me the
theater is act and perpetual emanation, that there is nothing
congealed about it, that I turn it into a true act, hence living,
hence magical.
And I am searching for every technical and practical means of
bringing the theater close to the high, perhaps excessive, at any
rate vital and violent idea that I conceive of it for myself.
As for the drawing up of the Manifesto, I realize that it is
abrupt and in large measure inadequate.
I propose unexpected, rigorous principles, of grim and terrible
aspect, and just when everyone is waiting for me to justify them, I
pass on to the next principle.
The dialectic of this Manifesto is admittedly weak. I leap
without transition from one idea to another. No internal necessity
justifies the arrangement.
As for the last objection, I claim that the director, having
become a kind of demiurge, at the back of whose head is this idea
of implacable purity and of its consummation whatever the cost,
if he truly wants to be a director, i.e., a man versed in the nature
of matter and objects, must conduct in the physical
ANTONIN ARTAUD 115
domain an exploration of intense movement and precise
emotional gesture which is equivalent on the psychological level
to the most absolute and complete moral discipline and on the
cosmic level to the unchaining of certain blind forces which
activate what they must activate and crush and burn on their way
what they must crush and burn.
And here is the general conclusion.
Theater is no longer an art; or it is a useles art. It conforms
at every point to the Occidental idea of art. We are surfeited with
ineffectual decorative feelings and activities without aim,
uniquely devoted to the pleasurable and the picturesque; we want
a theater that functions actively, but on a level still to be defined.
We need true action, but without practical consequence. It is
not on the social level that the action of theater unfolds. Still less
on the moral and psychological levels.
Clearly the problem is not simple; but however chaotic,
impenetrable, and forbidding our Manifesto may be, at least it
does not evade the real question but on the contrary attacks it head
on, which no one in the theater has dared to do for a long time.
Nobody up to now has tackled the very principle of the theater,
which is metaphysical; and if there are so few worthy plays, it is
not for lack of talent or authors.
Putting the question of talent aside, there is a fundamental
error of principle in the European theater; and this error is
contingent upon a whole order of things in which the absence of
talent appears as a consequence and not merely an accident.
If the age turns away from the theater, in which it is no longer
interested, it is because the theater has ceased to represent it. It no
longer hopes to be provided by the theater with Myths on which
it can sustain itself.
We are living through a period probably unique in the history
of the world, when the world, passed through a sieve, sees its old
values crumble. Our calcined life is dissolving at its base, and on
the moral or social level this is expressed by
a monstrous unleashing of appetites, a liberation of the basest
instincts, a crackling of burnt lives prematurely exposed to the
flame.
What is interesting in the events of our time is not the events
themselves, but this state of moral ferment into which they make
our spirits fall; this extreme tension. It is the state of conscious
chaos into which they ceaselessly plunge us.
And everything that disturbs the mind without causing it to
lose its equilibrium is a moving means of expressing the innate
pulsations of life.
It is from this mythical and moving immediacy that the theater
has turned away; no wonder the public turns away from a theater
that ignores actuality to this extent.
The theater as we practice it can therefore be reproached with a
terrible lack of imagination. The theater must make itself the
equal of life-not an individual life, that individual aspect of life in
which CHARACTERS triumph, but the sort of liberated life
which sweeps away human individuality and in which man is
only a reflection. The true purpose of the theater 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.
And by so doing to arrive at a kind of general resemblance,
so powerful that it produces its effect instantaneously.
May it free us, in a Myth in which we have sacrificed our little
human individuality, like Personages out of the Past, with powers
rediscovered in the Past.
FOURTH
LETTER
To J. P. Paris, May 28, 1933
Dear friend,
I did not say that I wanted to act directly upon our times;
I said that the theater I wanted to create assumed, in order to
ANTONIN ARTAUD 117
be possible, in order to be permitted by the times to exist, another
form of civilization.
But without representing its times, the theater can impel the
ideas, customs, beliefs, and principles from which the spirit of the
time derives to a profound transformation. In any case it does not
prevent me from doing what I want to do and doing it rigorously.
I will do what I have dreamed or I will do nothing.
In the matter of the spectacle it is not possible for me to
give supplementary particulars. And for two reasons:
1. the first is that for once what I want to do is easier to
do than to say.
2. the second is that I do not want to risk being plagiarized,
which has happened to me several times.
In my view no one has the right to call himself author, that is to
say creator, except the person who controls the direct handling of
the stage. And exactly here is the vulnerable point of the theater
as it is thought of not only in France but in Europe and even in the
Occident as a whole: Occidental theater recognizes as language,
assigns the faculties and powers of a language, permits to be
called language (with that particular intellectual dignity generally
ascribed to this word) only articulated language, grammatically
articulated language, Le., the language of speech, and of written
speech, speech which, pronounced or unpronounced, has no
greater value than if it is merely written.
In the theater as we conceive it, the text is everything. It is
understood and definitely admitted, and has passed into our habits
and thinking, it is an established spiritual value that the language
of words is the major language. But it must be admitted even
from the Occidental point of view that speech becomes ossified
and that words, all words, are frozen and cramped in their
meanings, in a restricted schematic terminology. For the theater
as it is practiced here, a written word has as much value as the
same word spoken. To certain theatrical
amateurs this means that a play read affords just as definite and
as great a satisfaction as the same play performed. Everything
concerning the particular enunciation of a word and the vibration
it can set up in space escapes them, and consequently, everything
that it is capable of adding to the thought. A word thus
understood has little more than a discursive, i.e., elucidative,
value. And it is not an exaggeration to say that in view of its very
definite and limited terminology the word is used only to sidestep
thought; it encircles it, but terminates it; it is only a conclusion.
Obviously it is not without cause that poetry has abandoned
the theater. It is not merely an accident that for a very long time
now every dramatic poet has ceased to produce. The language of
speech has its laws. We have become too well
accustomed, for more than four hundred years, especially in
France, to employing words in the theater in a single defined
sense. We have made the action turn too exclusively on psy-
chological themes whose essential combinations are not in
finite, far from it. We have overaccustomed the theater to a
lack of curiosity and above all of imagination.
Theater, like speech, needs to be set free.
This obstinacy in making characters talk about feelings,
passions, desires, and impulses of a strictly psychological order,
in which a single word is to compensate for innumerable gestures,
is the reason, since we are in the domain of precision, the theater
has lost its true raison d' etre and why we have
come to long for a silence in it in which we could listen more
closely to life. Occidental psychology is expressed in dialogue;
and the obsession with the defined word which says everything
ends in the withering of words.
Oriental theater has been able to preserve a certain expansive
value in words, since the defined sense of a word is not
everything, for there is its music, which speaks directly to the
unconscious. That is why in the Oriental theater there is no
spoken language, but a language of gestures, attitudes, and
ANTONIN ARTAUD 119
signs which from the point of view of thought in action have as
much expansive and revelational value as the other. And since in
the Orient this sign language is valued more than the other,
immediate magic powers are attributed to it. It is called upon to
address not only the mind but the senses, and through the senses
to attain still richer and more fecund regions of the sensibility at
full tide.
If, then, the author is the man who arranges the language of
speech and the director is his slave, there is merely a question of
words. There is here a confusion over terms, stemming from the
fact that, for us, and according to the sense generally attributed to
the word director, this man is merely an artisan, an adapter, a kind
of translator eternally devoted to making a dramatic work pass
from one language into another; this confusion will be possible
and the director will be forced to play second fiddle to the author
only so long as there is a tacit agreement that the language of
words is superior to others and that the theater admits none other
than this one language.
But let there be the least return to the active, plastic, respiratory
sources of language, let words be joined again to the physical
motions that gave them birth, and let the discursive, logical aspect
of speech disappear beneath its affective, physical side, Le., let
words be heard in their sonority rather than be exclusively taken
for what they mean grammatically, let them be perceived as
movements, and let these movements themselves turn into other
simple, direct movements as occurs in all the circumstances of life
but not sufficiently with actors on the stage, and behold! the
language of literature is reconstituted, revivified, and furthermore-
as in the canvasses of certain painters of the past--objects
themselves begin to speak.
Light, instead of decorating, assumes the qualities of an actual
language, and the stage effects, all humming with significations,
take on an order, reveal patterns. And this immediate and
physical language is entirely at the director's disposal. This is the
occasion for him to create in complete autonomy.
It would be quite singular if the person who rules a domain
closer to life than the author's, i.e., the director, had on every
occasion to yield precedence to the author, who by definition
works in the abstract, i.e., on paper. Even if the mise en scene did
not have to its credit the language of gestures which equals and
surpasses that of words, any mute mise en scene, with its
movement, its many characters, lighting, and set, should rival all
that is most profound in paintings such as van den Leyden's
"Daughters of Lot," certain "Sabbaths" of Goya, certain
"Resurrections" and "Transfigurations" of Greco, the "Temptation
of Saint Anthony" by Hieronymus Bosch, and the disquieting and
mysterious "Dulle Griet" by the elder Breughel, in which a
torrential red light, though localized in certain parts of the canvas,
seems to surge up from all sides and, through some unknown
technical process, glue the spectator's staring eyes while still yards
away from the canvas: the theater swarms in all directions. The
turmoil of life, confined by a ring of white light, runs suddenly
aground on nameless shallows. A screeching, livid noise rises
from this bacchanal of grubs of which even the bruises on human
skin can never approach the color. Real life is moving and white;
the hidden life is livid and fixed, possessing every possible
attitude of incalculable immobility.
This is mute theater, but one that tells more than if it had received
a language in which to express itself. Each of these paintings has
a double sense, and beyond its purely pictorial qualities discloses
a message and reveals mysterious or terrible aspects of nature and
mind alike.
But happily for the theater, the mise en scene is much more
than that. For besides creating a performance with palpable
material means, the pure mise en scene contains, in gestures,
facial expressions and mobile attitudes, through a concrete use of
music, everything that speech contains and has speech at its
disposal as well. Rhythmic repetitions of syllables and particular
modulations of the voice, swathing the precise sense of words,
arouse swarms of images in the brain, producing a
ANTONIN ARTAUD 121
more or less hallucinatory state and impelling the sensibility and
mind alike to a kind of organic alteration which helps to strip
from the written poetry the gratuitousness that commonly
characterizes it. And it is around this gratuitousness that the
whole problem of theater is centered.
XI. The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto)
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a

transcendent experience of life, is what the public is funda-
mentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
The Theater of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to
the theater a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it
is in this sense of violent rigor and extreme condensation of
scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be
understood.
This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not
systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe
moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be
paid.
FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF CONTENT
that is, of the subjects and themes to be treated:

The Theater of Cruelty will choose subjects and themes
corresponding to the agitation and unrest characteristic of our
epoch.
It does not intend to leave the task of distributing the Myths of
man and modern life entirely to the movies. But it will do it in its
own way: that is, by resisting the economic, utilitarian. and
technical streamlining of the world, it will again bring
122
ANTONIN ARTAUD 123
into fashion the great preoccupations and great essential passions
which the modern theater has hidden under the patina of the
pseudocivilized man.
These themes will be cosmic, universal, and interpreted
according to the most ancient texts drawn from old Mexican,
Hindu, Judaic, and Iranian cosmogonies.
Renouncing psychological man, with his well-dissected char-
acter and feelings, and social man, submissive to laws and
misshapen by religions and precepts, the Theater of Cruelty will
address itself only to total man.
And it will cause not only the recto but the verso of the mind to
play its part; the reality of imagination and dreams will appear
there on equal footing with life.
Furthermore, great social upheavals, conflicts between peoples
and races, natural forces, interventions of chance, and the
magnetism of fatality will manifest themselves either indirectly, in
the movement and gestures of characters enlarged to the statures
of gods, heroes, or monsters, in mythical dimensions, or directly,
in material forms obtained by new scientific means.
These gods or heroes, these monsters, these natural and cosmic
forces will be interpreted according to images from the most
ancient sacred texts and old cosmogonies.
2. FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF FORM
Besides this need for the theater to steep itself in the springs of
an eternally passionate and sensuous poetry available to even the
most backward and inattentive portions of the public, a poetry
realized by a return to the primitive Myths, we shall require of the
mise en scene and not of the text the task of materializing these
old conflicts and above all of giving them immediacy; i.e., these
themes will be borne directly into the
theater and materialized in movements, expressions, and gestures
before trickling away in words.
Thus we shall renounce the theatrical superstition of the
text and the dictatorship of the writer.
And thus we rejoin the ancient popular drama, sensed and
experienced directly by the mind without the deformations of
language and the barrier of speech.
We intend to base the theater upon spectacle before everything
else, and we shall introduce into the spectacle a new notion of
space utilized on all possible levels and in all degrees of
perspective in depth and height, and within this notion a specific
idea of time will be added to that of movement:
In a given time, to the greatest possible number of movements'
we will join the greatest possible number of physical images and
meanings attached to those movements.
The images and movements employed will not be there solely
for the external pleasure of eye or ear, but for that more secret and
profitable one of the spirit.
Thus, theater space will be utilized not only in its dimensions
and volume but, so to speak, in its undersides (dans ses dessous).
The overlapping of images and movements will culminate,
through the collusion of objects, silences, shouts, and rhythms, or
in a genuine physical language with signs, not words, as its root.
For it must be understood that in this quantity of movements
and images arranged for a given length of time, we include both
silence and rhythm as well as a certain physical vibration and
commotion, composed of objects and gestures really made and
really put to use. And it can be said that the spirit of the most
ancient hieroglyphs will preside at the creation of this pure
theatrical language.
Every popular audience has always loved direct expressions
and images; articulate speech, explicit verbal expressions will
ANTONIN ARTAUD 125
enter in all the clear and sharply elucidated parts of the action, the
parts where life is resting and consciousness intervenes.
But in addition to this logical sense, words will be construed in
an incantational, truly magical sense-for their shape and their
sensuous emanations, not only for their meaning.
For these exciting appearances of monsters, debauches of
heroes and gods, plastic revelations of forces, explosive inter-
jections of a poetry and humor poised to disorganize and pulverize
appearances, according to the anarchistic principle of all genuine
poetry--these appearances will not exercise their true magic except
in an atmosphere of hypnotic suggestion in which the mind is
affected by a direct pressure upon the senses.
Whereas, in the digestive theater of today, the nerves, that is to
say a certain physiological sensitivity, are deliberately left aside,
abandoned to the individual anarchy of the spectator, the Theater
of Cruelty intends to reassert all the time-tested magical means of
capturing the sensibility.
These means, which consist of intensities of colors, lights, or
sounds, which utilize vibration, tremors, repetition, whether of a
musical rhythm or a spoken phrase, special tones or a general
diffusion of light, can obtain their full effect only by the use of
dissonances.
But instead of limiting these dissonances to the orbit of a
single sense, we shall cause them to overlap from one sense to
the other, from a color to a noise, a word to a light, a fluttering
gesture to a flat tonality of sound, etc.
So composed and so constructed, the spectacle will be ex-
tended, by elimination of the stage, to the entire hall of the
theater and will scale the walls from the ground up on light
catwalks, will physically envelop the spectator and immerse him
in a constant bath of light, images, movements, and noises. The
set will consist of the characters themselves, enlarged to the
stature of gigantic manikins, and of landscapes of moving lights
playing on objects and masks in perpetual interchange.
And just as there will be no unoccupied point in. space, there
will be neither respite nor vacancy in the spectator's mind or
sensibility. That is, between life and the theater there will be no
distinct division, but instead a continuity. Anyone who has
watched a scene of any movie being filmed will understand
exactly what we mean.
We want to have at our disposal, for a theater spectacle, the
same material means which, in lights, extras, resources of all
kinds, are daily squandered by companies on whom everything
that is active and magical in such a deployment is forever lost.
.
The first spectacle of the Theater of Cruelty will be entitled:

THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO
It will stage events, not men. Men will come in their turn with
their psychology and their passions, but they will be taken as the
emanation of certain. forces and understood in the light of the
events and historical fatality in which they have played their role.
This subject has been chosen:
1. Because of its immediacy and all the allusions it permits
to problems of vital interest for Europe and the world.
From the historical point of view, The Conquest of Mexico
poses the question of colonization. It revives in a brutal and
implacable way the ever active fatuousness of Europe. It permits
her idea of her own superiority to be deflated. It contrasts
Christianity with much older religions. It corrects the false
conceptions the Occident has somehow formed concerning
paganism and certain natural religions, and it underlines with
burning emotion the splendor and forever immediate poetry of the
old metaphysical sources on which these religions are built.
2. By broaching the alarmingly immediate question of col-
onization and tie right one continent thinks it has to enslave
another, this subject questions the real superiority of certain
ANTONIN ARTAUD 127
races over others and shows the inmost filiation that binds the
genius of a race to particular forms of civilization. It contrasts the
tyrannical anarchy of the colonizers to the profound moral
harmony of the as yet uncolonized.
Further, by contrast with the disorder of the European
monarchy of the time, based upon the crudest and most unjust
material principles, it illuminates the organic hierarchy of the
Aztec monarchy established on indisputable spiritual principles.
From the social point of view, it shows the peacefulness of a
society which knew how to feed all its members and in which the
Revolution had been accomplished from the very beginnings.
Out of this clash of moral disorder and Catholic monarchy with
pagan order, the subject can set off unheard-of explosions of
forces and images, sown here and there with brutal dialogues.
Men battling hand to hand, bearing within themselves, like
stigmata, the most opposed ideas.
The moral grounds and the immediacy of interest of such a
spectacle being sufficiently stressed, let us emphasize the value as
spectacle of the conflicts it will set upon the stage.
There are first of all the inner struggles of Montezuma, the
divided king concerning whose motivations history has been
unable to enlighten us.
His struggles and his symbolic discussion with the visual
myths of astrology will be shown in an objective pictorial fashion.
Then, besides Montezuma, there are the crowd, the different
social strata, the revolt of the people against destiny as repre-
sented by Montezuma, the clamoring of. the unbelievers, the
quibbling of the philosophers and priests, the lamentations of the
poets, the treachery of the merchants and the bourgeoisie, the
duplicity and profligacy of the women.
The spirit of the crowds, the breath of events will travel in
material waves over the spectacle, fixing here and there certain
lines of force, and on these waves the dwindling, rebellious, or
despairing consciousness of individuals will float like straws.
Theatrically, the problem is to determine and harmonize these
lines of force, to concentrate them and extract suggestive
melodies from them.
These images, movements, dances, rites, these fragmented
melodies and sudden turns of dialogue will be carefully recorded
and described as far as possible with words, especially for the
portions of the spectacle not in dialogue, the principle here being
to record in codes, as on a musical score, what cannot be
described in words.
* Here now is the structure of the spectacle according to the
order in which it will unfold.
Act One
WARNING SIGNS
A tableau of Mexico in anticipation, with. its cities, its

countrysides, its caves of troglodytes, its Mayan ruins.
Objects evoking on a grand scale certain Spanish ex-votos and
those bizarre landscapes that are enclosed in bottles or under
glass bells.
Similarly the cities, monuments, countryside, forest, ruins and
caves will be evoked--their appearance, disappearance, their form
in relief--by means of lighting. The musical or pictorial means of
emphasizing their forms, of catching their sharpness will be
devised in the spirit of a secret lyricism, invisible to the spectator,
and which will correspond to the inspiration of a poetry
overflowing with whispers and suggestions.
Everything trembles and groans, like a shop-window in a
* This fuller development of Artaud's The Conquest of Mexico was

not included in the French edition of LeTheatre et son Double: it was
first published in La Net, March-April 1950, where the whole text was
called "Potlatch of mighty hosts for their mighty guests." M.C.R..
ANTONIN ARTAUD 129
hurricane. A landscape which senses the coming storm; objects,
music, stuffs, lost dresses, shadows of wild horses pass through
the air like distant meteors, like lightning on the horizon
brimming with mirages as the wind pitches wildly along the
ground in a lighting prophecying torrential, violent storms. Then
the lighting begins to change, and to the bawling conversations,
the disputes between all the echoes of the population, respond the
mute, concentrated, terrorized meetings of Montezuma with his
formally assembled priests, with the signs of the zodiac, the
austere forms of the firmament.
For Cortez, a mise en scene of sea and tiny battered ships, and
Cortez and his men larger than the ships and firm as rocks.
Act Two
CONFESSION
Mexico seen this time by Cortez.
Silence concerning all his secret struggles; apparent stag
nation and everywhere magic, magic of a motionless, unheard of
spectacle, with cities like ramparts of light, palaces on canals
of stagnant water, a heavy melody. .
Then suddenly, on a single sharp and piercing note, heads

crown the walls.
Then a muffled rumbling full of threats, an impression of
terrible solemnity, holes in the crowds like pockets of calm in a
tornado: Montezuma advances all alone toward Cortez.
Act Three
CONVULSIONS
At every level of the country, revolt.
At every level of Montezuma's consciousness, revolt.
Battleground in the mind of Montezuma, who debates with
destiny.
Magic, magical mise en scene evoking the Gods.
Montezuma cuts the living space, rips it open like the sex of a
woman in order to cause the invisible to spring forth.
The stage wall is stuffed unevenly with heads, throats; cracked,
oddly broken melodies, and responses to these melodies, appear
like stumps. Montezuma himself seems split in two, divided; with
some parts of himself in half-light, others dazzling; with many
hands coming out of his dress, with expressions painted on his
body like a multiple portrait of consciousness, but from within the
consciousness of Montezuma all the questions pass forth into the
crowd.
The Zodiac, which formerly roared with all it beasts in the
head of Montezuma, turns into a group of human passions made
incarnate by the learned heads of the official spokesmen, brilliant
at disputation--a group of secret plays during which the crowd,
despite the circumstances, does not forget to sneer.
However, the real warriors make their sabers whine, whetting
them on the houses. Flying ships cross a Pacific of purplish
indigo, laden with the riches of fugitives, and in the other
direction contraband weapons arrive on other flying vessels.
An emaciated man eats soup as fast as he can, with a pre-
sentiment that the siege is approaching the city, and as the
rebellion breaks out, the stage space is gorged with a brawling
mosaic where sometimes men, sometimes compact troops tightly
pressed together, limb to limb, clash frenetically. Space is stuffed
with whirling gestures, horrible faces, dying eyes, clenched fists,
manes, breastplates, and from all levels of the scene fall limbs,
breastplates, heads, stomachs like a hailstorm bombarding the
earth with supernatural explosions.
Act Four
ABDICATION
The abdication of Montezuma results in a strange and almost

malevolent loss of assurance on the part of Cortez and
ANTONIN ARTAUD 131
his fighters. A specific discord arises over the discovery of
treasure, seen like illusions in the comers of the stage. (This will
be done with mirrors.)
Lights and sounds produce an impression of dissolving,
unravelling, spreading, and squashing--like watery fruits splash-
ing on the. ground. Strange couples appear, Spaniard with Indian,
horribly enlarged, swollen and black, swaying back and forth like
carts about to overturn. Several Hernando Cortez's enter at the
same time, signifying that there is no longer any leader. In some
places, Indians massacre Spaniards; while in front of a statue
whose head is revolving in time to music, Cortez, arms dangling,
seems to dream. Treasons go unpunished, shapes swarm about,
never exceeding a certain height in the air.
This unrest and the threat of a revolt on the part of the
conquered will be expressed in ten thousand ways. And in this
collapse and disintegration of the brutal force which has worn
itself out (having nothing more to devour) will be delineated the
first inkling of a passionate romance.
Weapons abandoned, emotions of lust now make their
appearance. Not the dramatic passions of so many battles, but
calculated feelings, a plot cleverly hatched, in which, for the first
time in the spectacle, a woman's head will be manifested.
And as a consequence of all this, it is also the time of miasmas,
of diseases.
On every expressive level appear, like muted flowerings:
sounds, words, poisonous blooms which burst close to the
ground. And, at the same time, a religious exhalation bends men's
heads, fearful sounds seem to bray out, clear as the capricious
flourishes of the sea upon a vast expanse of sand, of a cliff
slashed by rocks. These are the funeral rites of Montezuma. A
stamping, a murmur. The crowd of natives whose steps sound
like a scorpion's jaws. Then, eddies in the path of the miasmas,
enormous heads with noses swollen with the stink--and nothing,
nothing but immense Spaniards on
crutches. And like a tidal wave, like the sharp burst of a storm,
like the whipping of rain on the sea, the revolt which carries off
the whole crowd in groups, with the body of the dead Montezuma
tossed on their heads like a ship. And the sharp spasms of the
battle, the foam of heads of the cornered Spaniards who are
squashed like blood against the ramparts that are turning green
again.
XII. An Affective Athleticism
One must grant the actor a kind of affective musculature which

corresponds to the physical localizations of feelings.
The actor is like the physical athlete, but with this surprising
difference: his affective organism is analogous to the organism of
the athlete, is parallel to it, as if it were its double, although not
acting upon the same plane.
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
The division of the total person into three worlds obtains
also for him; and his is the affective sphere.
It belongs to him organically.
The muscular movements of physical effort comprise an
effigy of another effort, their double, and in the movements of
dramatic action are localized at the same points.
What the athlete depends upon in running is what the actor
depends upon in shouting a passionate curse, but the actor's
course is altogether interior.
All the tricks of wrestling, boxing, the hundred yard dash,
high-jumping, etc., find analogous organic bases in the movement
of the passions; they have the same physical points of support.
With however this additional correction, that the movement is
reversed: in breathing, for example, the actor's body is supported
by his breath whereas the physical athlete's breath is supported by
his body.
133
This question of breath is in fact primary; it is in inverse
proportion to the strength of the external expression.
The more sober and restrained the expression, the deeper and
heavier the breathing, the more substantial and full of resonances.
Similarly an expression that is broad and full and externalized
has a corresponding breath in short and broken waves.
It is certain that for every feeling, every mental action, every
leap of human emotion there is a corresponding breath which is
appropriate to it.
The tempos of the breath have a name taught us by the Cabala;
it is these tempos which give the human heart its shape, and the
movements of the passions their sex.
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by
vague instinct.
However, it is not a matter, whatever one may think, of
teaching him to be incoherent.
It is a matter of remedying this wild ignorance in which the
whole contemporary theater moves as if in a fog, ceaselessly
stumbling. The gifted actor finds by instinct how to tap and
radiate certain powers; but he would be astonished indeed if it
were revealed to him that these powers, which have their material
trajectory by and in the organs, actually exist, for he has never
realized they could actually exist.
To make use of his emotions as a wrestler makes use of his
muscles, he has to see the human being as a Double, like the Ka of
the Egyptian mummies, like a perpetual specter from which the
affective powers radiate.
The plastic and never completed specter, whose forms the true
actor apes, on which he imposes the forms and image of his own
sensibility.
It is this double which the theater influences, this spectral
effigy which it shapes, and like all specters, this double has a long
memory. The heart's memory endures and it is certainly with his
heart that the actor thinks; here the heart holds sway.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 135
This means that in the theater more than anywhere else it is the
affective world of which the actor must be aware, ascribing to it
virtues which are not those of an image but carry a material sense.
Whether the hypothesis is exact or not, the important thing

is that it is verifiable.
The soul can be physiologically reduced to a skein of
vibrations.
This soul-specter can be regarded as intoxicated with its own
screams, something like the Hindu mantras--those consonances,
those mysterious accents, in which the material secrets of the
soul, tracked down to their lairs, speak out in broad daylight.
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 material, makes accessible an
empire of passions that extends our sovereignty.
To join with the passions by means of their forces, instead of
regarding them as pure abstractions, confers a mastery upon the
actor which makes him equal to a true healer.
To know that the soul has a corporeal expression permits the
actor to unite with this soul from the other side, and to rediscover
its being by mathematical analogies.
To understand the secret of the passional time--a kind of
musical tempo which regulates their harmonic beat--is an aspect
of theater long undreamed of by our modern psychological
theater.
This tempo can be discovered by analogy; and it is found in the

six ways of apportioning and conserving the breath as if it were a
precious element.
Every breath has three kinds of time, just as there are three
principles at the root of all creation which find a corresponding
pattern even in the breath.
The Cabala apportions the human breath into six principal
arcana, the first of which, called the Great Arcanum, is that of
creation:
ANDROGYNOUS MALE FEMALE
BALANCED EXPANDING ATTRACTING
NEUTRAL POSITIVE NEGATIVE
I have had the idea of employing this knowledge of the kinds
of breathing not only in the actor's work but in the actor's
preparation for his craft. For if knowledge of breathing makes
clear the soul's color, it can with all the more reason stimulate the
soul and encourage its blossoming.
It is certain that since breathing accompanies effort, the
mechanical production of breath will engender in the working
organism a quality corresponding to effort.
The effort will have the color and rhythm of the artificially
produced breath.
Effort sympathetically accompanies breathing and, according
to the quality of the effort to be produced, a preparatory emission
of breath will make this effort easy and spontaneous. I insist on
the word spontaneous, for breath rekindles life, sets it afire in its
own substance.
What voluntary breathing provokes is a spontaneous re-
appearance of life. Like a voice, in infinite colors on the edges of
which warriors lie sleeping. The morning reveille sends them by
ranks into the thick of the fight. But let a child suddenly cry
"Wolf!" and see how these same warriors leap up. They wake in
the middle of the night. False alarm: the soldiers are beginning to
return. But no: they run into hostile camps, they have fallen into a
regular hornet's nest. It is in a dream that the child has cried out.
Its more sensitive, fluctuating unconscious has stumbled into a
troop of enemies. Thus by indirect means, the fiction provoked by
the theater falls upon a reality much more forbidding than the
other, a reality never suspected by life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 137
Thus with the whetted edge of breath the actor carves out his
character.
For breath, which nourishes life, allows its stages to be
ascended rung by rung. And an actor can arrive by means of
breath at a feeling which he does not have, provided its effects are
judiciously combined and its sex not mistaken. For breath is
either male or female; and less often it is androgynous. However,
one may have rare undeveloped states to depict.
Breath accompanies feeling, and the actor can penetrate into
this feeling by means of breath provided he knows how to select
among the different kinds the one appropriate to the feeling.
There are, as we have said, six principal combinations of
breaths.
NEUTER MASCULINE FEMININE

NEUTER FEMININE MASCULINE
MASCULINE NEUTER FEMININE
FEMININE NEUTER MASCULINE
MASCULINE FEMININE NEUTER
FEMININE MASCULINE NEUTER
And a seventh state which is beyond breath and which, through
the door of the highest Guna, the state of Sattva, joins the
manifest to the non-manifest.
If it is claimed that the actor should not be preoccupied with
this seventh state since he is not essentially a metaphysician, we
shall reply that even though the theater may be the perfect and
most complete symbol of universal manifestation, the actor carries
in himself the principle of that seventh state, of that blood-route
by which he penetrates into all the others each time his organs in
full power awaken from their sleep.
Indeed most of the time instinct is there to compensate for the
absence of an idea that cannot be defined; and there is no need to
fall from so high to emerge among median passions like those
that stuff the contemporary theater. Moreover the
system of breaths has not been Invented to produce median
passions. And our repeated exercises in breathing, developing its
procedures by intense practice, are not cultivated merely to
prepare us for a declaration of adulterous love.
But for a subtle quality of outcry, for the soul's desperate
claims-it is for these that an emission of breath seven or twelve
times repeated prepares us.
And we localize this breath, we apportion it out in states of
contraction and release combined. We use our body like a screen
through which pass the will and the relaxation of will.
The tempo of voluntary thought we project by a forcefully
male beat, followed without too apparent a transition by a
prolonged feminine beat.
The tempo of involuntary thought or even of no thought at all
is expressed by a weary feminine breath that makes us inhale a
stifling cellar heat, the moist wind of a forest; and on the same
prolonged beat we exhale heavily; however the muscles of our
whole body, vibrating by areas, have not ceased to function.
The important thing is to become aware of the localization of
emotive thought. One means of recognition is effort or tension;
and the same points which support physical effort are those which
also support the emanation of emotive thought: they serve as a
springboard for the emanation of a feeling.
It is to be noted that everything feminine-that which is
surrender, anguish, plea, invocation--everything that stretches
toward something in a gesture of supplication--is supported
also upon the points where effort is localized, but like a diver
pressing against the bottom of the sea in order to rise to the
surface: it is as if emptiness gushes from the spot where the
tension was.
But in this case the masculine returns to haunt the place of the
feminine like a shadow; while, when the affective state is male,
the interior body consists of a sort of inverse geometry, an image
of the state reversed.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 139
To become conscious of physical obsession of muscles
quivering with affectivity, is equivalent, as in the play of breaths,
to unleashing this affectivity in full force, giving it a mute but
profound range of extraordinary violence.
Thus it appears that any actor whatsoever, even the least gifted,
can by means of this physical knowledge increase the internal
density and volume of his feeling, and a full-bodied expression
follows upon this organic taking-hold.
It does no harm to our purposes to know certain points of
localization.
The man who lifts weights lifts them with his back; it is by a
contortion of his back that he supports the fortified strength of his
arms; and curiously enough he claims that, inversely, when any
feminine feeling hollows him out--sobbing, despair, spasmodic
panting, dread--he realizes his emptiness in the small of his back,
at the very place where Chinese acupuncture relieves congestion
of the kidney. For Chinese medicine proceeds only by concepts of
empty and full. Convex and concave. Tense and relaxed. Yin and
Yang. Masculine and feminine.
Another radiating point: the location of anger, attack, biting is
the center of the solar plexus. It is there that the head supports
itself in order to cast its venom, morally speaking.
The location of heroism and sublimity is also that of guilt --
where one strikes one's breast. The spot where anger boils, the
anger that rages and does not advance.
But where anger advances, guilt retreats; that is the secret of
the empty and the full.
A high-pitched, self-mutilating anger begins with a clacking
neuter and is localized in the plexus by a rapid feminine
emptying; then, obstructed by the two shoulder-blades, turns like
a boomerang and erupts in male sparks, which consume
themselves without going further. In order to lose their
aggressive quality they preserve the correlation of male breath:
they expire fiercely.
I have wanted to give only a few examples bearing on a few
fertile principles which comprise the material of this technical
essay. Others, if they have time, will prepare the complete
anatomy of the system. There are 380 points in Chinese
acupuncture, with 73 principal ones which are used in current
therapy. There are many fewer crude outlets for human
affectivity.
Many fewer supports which can be indicated and on which to
base the soul's athleticism.
The secret is to exacerbate these supports as if one were
flaying the muscles.
The rest is done by outcry.
.
In order to reforge the chain, the chain of a rhythm in which
the spectator used to see his own reality in the spectacle, the
spectator must be allowed to identify himself with the spectacle,
breath by breath and beat by beat.
It is not sufficient for this spectator to be enchained by the
magic of the play; it will not enchain him if we do not know
where to take hold of him. There is enough chance magic, enough
poetry which has no science to back it up.
In the theater, poetry and science must henceforth be identical.
Every emotion has organic bases. It is by cultivating his
emotion in his body that the actor recharges his voltage.
To know in advance what points of the body to touch is the
key to throwing the spectator into magical trances. And it is this
invaluable kind of science that poetry in the theater has been
without for a long time.
To know the points of localization in the body is thus to
reforge the magical chain.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 141
And through the hieroglyph of a breath I am able to recover an
idea of the sacred theater.
N.B.--No one in Europe knows how to scream any more, and

particularly actors in trance no longer know how to cry out. Since
they do nothing but talk and have forgotten they ever had a body
in the theater, they have naturally also forgotten the use of their
windpipes. Abnormally shrunk, the windpipe is not even an organ
but a monstrous abstraction that talks: actors in France no longer
know how to do anything but talk.
XIII. Two Notes
I.--THE MARX BROTHERS
The first film of the Marx Brothers that we have seen here,
Animal Crackers, appeared to me and to everyone as an
extraordinary thing: the liberation through the medium of the
screen of a particular magic which the customary relation of
words and images does not ordinarily reveal, and if there is a
definite characteristic, a distinct poetic state of mind that can be
called surrealism, Animal Crackers participated in that state
altogether.
It is difficult to say of what this kind of magic consists. It is
probably not specifically cinematic, nor theatrical; perhaps only
certain successful surrealist poems, if there were any, could give
an idea of it. The poetic quality of 'a film like Animal Crackers
would fit the definition of humor if this word had not long since
lost its sense of essential liberation, of destruction of all reality in
the mind.
In order to understand the powerful, total, definitive, absolute
originality (I am not exaggerating, I am trying simply to define,
and so much the worse if my enthusiasm carries me away) of
films like Animal Crackers and, at times (at any rate in the whole
last part), Monkey Business, you would have to add to humor the
notion of something disquieting and tragic, a fatality (neither
happy nor unhappy, difficult to
142
ANTONIN ARTAUD 143
formulate) which would hover over it like the cast of an appalling
malady upon an exquisitely beautiful profile.
In Monkey Business the Marx Brothers, each with his own
style, are confident and ready, one feels, to wrestle with cir-
cumstances. Whereas in Animal Crackers each character was
losing face from the very beginning, here for three-quarters of the
picture one is watching the antics of clowns who are amusing
themselves and making jokes, some very successful, and it is only
at the end that things grow complicated, that objects, animals,
sounds, master and servants, host and guests, everything goes
mad, runs wild, and revolts amid the simultaneously ecstatic and
lucid comments of one of the Marx Brothers, inspired by the spirit
he has finally been able to unleash and whose stupefied and
momentary commentator he seems to be. There is nothing at once
so hallucinatory and so terrible as this type of man-hunt, this
battle of rivals, this chase in the shadows of a cow barn, a stable
draped in cobwebs, while men, women and animals break their
bounds and land in the middle of a heap of crazy objects, each of
whose movement or noise functions in its turn.
In Animal Crackers a woman may suddenly fall, legs in the air,
on a divan and expose, for an instant, all we could wish to see-a
man may throw himself abruptly upon a woman in a salon, dance
a few steps with her and then
whack her on the behind in time to the music--these events
comprise a kind of exercise of intellectual freedom in which the
unconscious of each of the characters, repressed by conventions
and habits, avenges itself and us at the same time. But in Monkey
Business when a hunted man throws himself upon a beautiful
woman and dances with her, poetically, in a sort of study in
charm and grace of attitude, the spiritual claim seems double and
shows everything that is poetic and revolutionary in the Marx
Brothers' jokes.
But the fact that the music to which the couple dances --the
hunted man and the beautiful woman--may be a music of
nostalgia and escape, a music of deliverance, sufficiently
indicates the dangerous aspect of all these funny jokes; and when
the poetic spirit is exercised, it always leads toward a kind of
boiling anarchy, an essential disintegration of the real by poetry.
If Americans, to whose spirit (esprit) this genre of films be-
longs, wish to take these films in a merely humorous sense, con-
fining the material of humor to the easy comic margins of the
meaning of the word, so much the worse for them; but that will
not prevent us from considering the conclusion of Monkey
Business as a hymn to anarchy and wholehearted revolt, this
ending that puts the bawling of a calf on the same intellectual
level and gives it the same quality of meaningful suffering as the
scream of a frightened woman, this ending that shows, in the
shadows of a dirty barn, two lecherous servants freely pawing the
naked shoulders of their master's daughter, the equals at last of
their hysterical master, all amidst the intoxication--which is
intellectual as well--of the Marx Brothers' pirouettes. And the
triumph of all this is in the kind of exaltation, simultaneously
visual and sonorous, to which these events attain among the
shadows, in their intensity of vibration, and in the powerful
anxiety which their total effect ultimately projects into the mind.
II. AUTOUR. D'UNE MERE *
A Dramatic Action by Jean-Louis Barrault
In Jean-Louis Barrault's spectacle there is a sort of marvelous centaur-

horse, and our emotion before it was as great as
* Mime created by Jean-Louis Barrault, based on William Faulkner's

As I Lay Dying, and first performed at the end of the 1934-35 season.
M.C.R.
ANTONIN ARTAUD 145
if J.-L. Barrault had restored magic itself to us with the entrance of
his centaur-horse.
This spectacle is magical like those incantations of witch
doctors when the clackings of their tongues against their palates
bring rain to a countryside; when, before the exhausted sick man,
the witch doctor gives his breath the form of a strange disease, and
chases away the sickness with his breath. In the same way, in J.-L.
Barrault's spectacle, at the moment of the mother's death, a chorus
of screams comes to life.
I do' not know if such a success is a masterpiece; in any case it
is an event. When an atmosphere is so transformed that a hostile
audience is suddenly and blindly immersed and invincibly
disarmed, it must be hailed as an event.
There is a secret strength in this spectacle which wins the
public like a great love wins a soul ripe for rebellion.
A great, young love, a youthful vigor, a spontaneous and lively
effervescence flow through the disciplined movements and
stylized mathematical gestures like the twittering of birds through
colonnades of trees in a magically arranged forest.
It is here, in this sacred atmosphere, that Jean-Louis Barrault
improvises the movements of a wild horse, and that one is
suddenly amazed to see him turn into a horse.
His spectacle demonstrates the irresistible expressiveness of
gesture; it victoriously proves the importance of gesture and of
movement in space. He restores to theatrical perspective the
importance it should never have lost. He fills the stage with
emotion and life.
It is in relation to the stage and on the stage that this spectacle
is organized: it cannot live except on the stage. And there is not
one point in the stage perspective that does not take on emotional
meaning.
In the animated gesticulations and discontinuous unfolding of
images there is a kind of direct physical appeal, something as
convincing as solace itself, and which memory will never release.
Nor will it release the mother's death nor her screams reechoing
in space and time, the epic crossing of the river, the fire rising in
men's throats and corresponding, on the level of gesture, to the
rising of another fire; and above all that man-horse running
through the play, as if the very spirit of Fable had come down
among us again.
Up to now only the Balinese Theater seemed to have kept a
trace of this lost spirit.
What does it matter if Jean-Louis Barrault has restored the
religious spirit by profane descriptive means, since everything that
is authentic is sacred and since his gestures are so beautiful that
they take on a symbolic significance.
Indeed, there are no symbols in Jean-Louis Barrault's play. And
if any reproach can be made against his gestures, it is that they
give us the illusion of symbol when in fact they are defining
reality; and that is why their expression, however violent and
active it may be, has no range beyond itself.
It has no such range because it is merely descriptive, because it
describes facts in which souls do not intervene; because it does
not touch the quick of either thoughts or souls. And it is here,
rather than in the question of whether this form of theater is
theatrical, that criticism of his work can be made.
But his work uses the means of the theater--for the theater,
which opens up a physical field, requires that this field be filled,
that its space be furnished with gestures, that this space live
magically in itself, release within itself an aviary of sounds, and
discover there new relations between sound, gesture, and voice--
and therefore we can say that what J .-L. Barrault has done is
theater.
But yet this performance is not the peak of theater, I mean the
deepest drama, the mystery deeper than souls, the excruciating
conflict of souls where gesture is only a path-there where man is
only a point and where lives drink at their source. But who has
drunk at the sources of life?
IN MEMORIAM: ANTONIN ART AUD
By Maurice Saillet
Antonin Artaud died March 4, 1948, at the age of fifty-two. The

date should be remembered as that of a new and terrible birth: the
moment this body and this mind, riveted together by long agony,
parted company, Artaud's real life began. The hailstorm of his
thought now batters our own; the harp of his nerves vibrates in
the world's void; and the knell has rung for several transitory
forms of literature and art.
In 1922, when his first poems were published in the Mercure
de France ("La Maree," "Marine," and "Soir"), Artaud was still
the "gentle angel" being murdered in slow motion that same year
in Claude Autant-Lara's film Fait-Divers. His face and his poetry
were instinct with that disturbing gentleness of a soul torn
between heaven and hell, a soul that can find the meaning and
fulfillment of its perfection only in its own disaster. The
symbolist cult of the spiritual, its preoccupation with "obscure
matters" is evident in Artaud's preface to Maeterlinck's Douze
Chansons, in which he also praises Boehme, Novalis, and
Ruysbroek: this is the period of his own mystical poems and of
Tric-Trac du Ciel. It is also the period in which he was acting
with Dullin, who permitted him to direct Calderon's Life Is a
Dream. He studied the Elizabethan theater which spattered gold
and blood upon the
147
148 MAURICE SAILLET
lofty clouds of his own aspirations as a poet. And he seems to

have found his vocation when he writes: "Drama is the mind's
most perfect expression. It is in the nature of profound things to
clash and combine, to evolve from one another. Action is the very
principle of life."
Nor is there much doubt that he was already familiar with those
"sacred poisons" which were to mark his life as they had
Baudelaire's. In 1923 he showed someone he knew to be
interested in new forms of expression a slender notebook of
poems-all or almost all in praise of morphine. Perhaps these were
the same poems he sent to the editor of the Nouvelle Revue
Francaise, poems which were to lead to the Correspondance avec
Jacques Riviere, an essential document in the history of modem
literature, a document which propounds the drama of Antonin
Artaud.
It is evident he made no mistake in his choice of a confidant.
With his extraordinary instinct for the secret resources of the soul,
an instinct he retained until the-- end of his life, he sensed
Riviere's "extreme sensitivity," his mind's "almost morbid
penetration." He therefore entrusted to Riviere his very existence
as a writer. At the same time he inquired about the "absolute
admissibility" of his poems, he presented him
self as a mental case, an illustration of "fragility of mind": "I
suffer from a fearful mental disease. My ideas abandon me at
every stage, from the mere fact of thought itself to the exterior
phenomenon of its materialization in words. Words, the forms of
sentences, inner directions of thought, the mind's simplest
reactions:--I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being."
The ambiguity of this letter, which is both a request for
literary advice and an examination of his own conscience (as are
the letters that follow), deceived Jacques Riviere as to the quality
of his correspondent. As to most young poets who aspired to
publication, he counselled patience and the diligent pursuit of an
original temperament--which, once
In Memoriam Antonin Artaud 149
seized, would enable the young man to write "perfectly coherent
and harmonious" poems.
But Antonin Artaud--perhaps unconsciously--had transcended
literary questions of a purely formal nature. If he hoped for
publication, it was to reassure himself about his ideas in terms of
their initial value, rather than as ultimate productions. A few
months later he felt the need to resume his confession in order to
plumb, if possible, his inmost depths. What is striking is the
distance--the elevation--he preserves, even in moments of the
most extreme intimacy: "I always have the distance separating me
from myself to cure me of other people's opinions." The defects--
the diffusion--of his poems reveal, as he put it, "a collapse of the
soul at its center, a kind of erosion [of ideas] that is both essential
and fugitive." And he implored Riviere to be his rescuer or his
absolute judge-while providing himself one loophole: "I am a man
whose mind has suffered greatly, and as such 1 have the right to
speak. 1 know how the mind's dealings are negotiated. 1 have
agreed to yield once and for all to my inferiority. . . ."
Jacques Riviere was not to be disconcerted by the pride that
mingled with the distress of this cry. He tried, sincerely enough, to
locate Artaud's quest somewhere between the marvelous mise en
scene of "our autonomous intellectual operations" which Valery
determined in La Soiree avec M.
Teste, and the dawning temptations of surrealism: "There is a
whole literature--I know it preoccupies you as much as it interests
me-which is the product of the immediate and, so to speak, animal
operation of the mind. This literature has the appearance of a great
plain of ruins; the columns still standing are supported by chance
alone. It is chance that reigns there, chance and a sort of dreary
multiplicity."
Riviere protested against this excessive liberty granted to
the mind--"the absolute is the source of our disorder"--and at the
same time warned against the dangers involved in the absence of
purpose or limit in the exercise of thought: "To
150 MAURICE SAILLET
become taut, the mind requires limitation, an encounter with the

blessed opacity of experience. The only cure for madness is the
innocence of facts."
It appears that Riviere was correct in his diagnosis of Artaud's
inability to concentrate on an object. Is this disease --which his
correspondent is conscious of sharing with so many others (he
gives as examples Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Pierre Reverdy)--
"something in the spirit of the times, a miracle floating in the air,
a cosmic prodigy of evil, or is it the discovery of a new world, a
genuine extension of reality?" Yet unlike his contemporaries,
Artaud feels that his soul is "physiologically stricken." He is as
unattached to life as to poetry. And he arrives quite logically at a
position foreboding the most tragic self-renunciation to which a
man has ever consented: "In me this want of application to an
object, a characteristic of all literature, is a want of application to
life. Speaking for myself, I can honestly say that I am not in the
world, and that such a statement is not merely an intellectual
attitude."
Andre Breton's theories were as impotent as Riviere's Christian

charity and literary integrity to maintain or withstand the destiny
of an Artaud. Today our total experience of this destiny judges
and condemns surrealism, which has revealed itself as nothing
more than a certain repertory of intellectual attitudes, or, more
commonly, of attitudes tout court. Director of the Office of
Surrealist Research in 1925, principal author of the Addresses to
the Pope and the Dalai Lama, published in the third number of La
Revolution Surrealiste, Artaud committed himself body and soul
to a movement in which his comrades confined themselves to
playing ---elegantly enough--with fire. This is obvious if we
compare his splendid Lettre a la voyante with the similar texts
that
abound in the surrealist books and magazines; if we read
his letter about the narcotics law, his accounts of dreams, and his
answers to various questionnaires on the subject of suicide
(which, he felt, should be anterior, i.e., capable of making us turn
back, "but on the other side of existence, and not on the side of
death").
Artaud's relations with surrealism are doubtless of interest only
to literary historians, or to literary gossips. They were inevitably
"tempestuous" (like everything else that went on in those
barracks) and quite discontinuous. It is worth remarking that
Artaud never indulged in automatic writing, that elementary
exercise which allowed the school's more talented members
access to an undeniable poetic verve, but which was to become
the most facile and monotonous of conventions. Artaud is one of
the rare men of his generation who seriously tried to cut off his
"writing hand," to break with the bundle of academic or
surrealistic tricks that make it possible to fill a page or a book
with the least possible effort and call it writing. He expressed
himself on this subject with agreeable ferocity--which should all
the same be taken quite literally:
"All writing is rubbish.
"People who try to free themselves from what is vague in
order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are
producing rubbish.
"The whole literary tribe is a pack of rubbish-mongers,
especially today.
"All those who have landmarks in their minds, I mean in a
certain part of their heads, in well-defined sites in their skulls, all
those who are masters of language, all those for whom words
have meaning, all those for whom the soul has its heights and
thought its currents, those who are the spirits of the times, and
who have given names to these currents of thought--I am thinking
of their specific tasks, and of that mechanical creaking their
minds produce at every gust of wind--are rubbish-mongers."
152 MAURICE SAILLET
We have already seen how Artaud, in his correspondence with
Jacques Riviere, made his farewells to intellectual life, properly
speaking--yet without losing hope of expressing himself "in dense
and active language. " He achieved this language from the
moment he gave up thinking of his mind as an autonomous organ.
In L'Ombilic des Limbes, Le Pesenerfs, and L'Art et la Mort,
which are so many "descriptions of a physical state," Artaud
becomes detached and yet remains present in this mind identified
with this body, this mind intermingled with this bundle of nerves-
this mind which "has opened onto the belly, and accumulates
from below a dark and untranslatable knowledge, full of
subterranean tides, hollow structures, a congealed agitation." He
is careful to add: "Do not construe these words as images. They
are attempting to construct an abominable wisdom."
From this point on, Antonin Artaud observes Antonin Artaud.
His work is an inventory of himself (for he refers everything back
to his own body, which is a prey to the fires of his mind--whether
his subject is Abelard, Uccello, or a painting by Andre Masson)
and at the same time an interminable message to himself. The
being who experiences his limbs and his brain to this degree has
no need to communicate with anyone else, and this separation
was to grow worse year by year in Artaud, until he answered the
call of madness itself.
Dreading this summons, he persisted in struggling against the
dizziness he experienced in his own presence: "It seems to me I
have plagued men enough with accounts of my spiritual
limitations, my excruciating psychical inadequacy; I think they
have a right to expect me either to offer something more than
impotent cries and the catalog of my shortcomings, or else keep
quiet" And he attempts, by means of the theater, to escape his
own performance.
Facing the public, he becomes that strange movie actor we
discover now in Abel Gance's Napoleon (his splenetic and
rebellious Marat leaves us with one unforgettable image of
the man after Charlotte Corday's crime-his head, sinister and yet
seraphic, leaning on the edge of the bathtub); now in La Passion
de Jeanne d'Arc (the most remarkable of his screen roles: Carl
Dreyer put his beauty to marvelous use as the tempter monk who
comes to the Maid not so much to confess her as to tear from her
an admission of heresy); now in Pabst's L'Opera de Quat' Sous,
in which he plays the upper-class young man who joins the
beggars. Apparently Artaud did not always choose his own parts:
his participation in a number of "commercial" films between 1919
and 1932 suggests that he regarded the cinema chiefly as a means
of livelihood. He also wrote two scenarios: La Coquille et le
Clergyman, produced in 1926 by Germaine Dulac, and La Revolte
du Boucher. In these efforts he attempted to work out a theory of
a subjective and visual kind of cinema "in which even psychology
would be devoured by the action."
This insistence on being "devoured by acts," this need for
psychic and physical expenditure characterizes his many
theatrical experiments, of which the first was a Theatre Alfred
Jarry, founded with Roger Vitrac, where he produced, between
1927 and 1929, Strindberg's Dream Play, the third act of
Claudel's Partage de Midi (acted as a farce), several of
Vitrac's plays, a musical sketch of his own, and Max Robur's
Gigogne (produced "as an intentional provocation").
Yet Artaud's dreams were to have more effect in the theater
than all his work as actor and director. Although he gave full
measure of his discoveries and his talents in a production--and
performance--of his play Les Cenci, a drama expressing all the
ferocity and corruption of the Renaissance, modeled after the
versions by Stendhal and Shelley, Artaud nevertheless remained
for many years outside the actual world of the theatre, its
companies and performances. Outside, but not apart: it was
during these years that he wrote the manifestoes collected in
1938 in Le Theatre et son Double.
154 MAURICE SAILLET
The first of these, favoring a "Theater of Cruelty" and opening

with this lapidary sentence: "We cannot go on prostituting the idea
of theater, whose only value is in its excruciating, magical relation
to reality and danger," reveals his preoccupations. Artaud wanted
not to reform but to revolutionize dramatic art from top to bottom.
Scorning all literature written to be performed ("No More
Masterpieces"), all Western traditions ("On the Balinese Theater,"
"An Affective Athleticism"), and civilization itself ("The Theater
and the Plague"), Artaud declares his willingness to destroy all
forms of language and all social proprieties in order to bring life
into the theater and make actors and spectators alike into "victims
burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames."
Before following Artaud along a path for which the theater was
perhaps only an active pretext, we must consider parenthetically
two works he wrote "between the acts." These were the two
demoniacal novels in which Artaud relates the lives of other
Antonins, as Baudelaire would have liked to relate his own by
translating Maturin's Melmoth. The first is in fact a French "copy"
of M. G. Lewis's original roman noir, The Monk. In this
supernatural debauch Artaud distinguishes
ETERNAL LIFE and claims to believe it from beginning to end:
"I have given myself over to charlatans, osteopaths, mages,
wizards, and palmists because all these things are, and because,
for me, there is no limit, no fixed form established for
appearances; and someday God--or MY MIND--will recognize
his own." Much more original and significant is the second of
these works, a life of Heliogabalus, the false Antonin, who was
cradled in sperm and buried in excrement. In him Artaud hails
Anarchy's crowning achievement, i.e., "the full-length portrait of
religious frenzy at its highest pitch, of aberration and conscious
madness, the image of every human contradiction, and of
contradiction in the very principle of things."
If we must consider these two works, in which Artaud
wallows in poison, as vacations from affliction rather than as
creative achievements, the same cannot be said for Le Voyage au
Pays des Tarahumaras. This magical text dominates everything
he had written so far. It is the account of two episodes of his visit
to Mexico in 1936, where he was doubtless attracted by the
bloody legends of the Aztecs, the savage beauty of the country
itself, the inhabitants' purity of countenance-and by peyotl. There
can be no doubt that this journey among the Tarahumara Indians
represented a kind of salvation for Artaud; never had his
suffering, his inner agony corresponded so well to his vision of
the world around him. The landscape he called "The Mountain of
Signs" seemed to be the very reflection of his tortured self. The
tangle of lines, the crevices in the rocks represented the accidents
of his own substance and brought him nearer to that petrifaction
he had hoped would put an end to his physiological and
metaphysical anguish; at last he might become the equivalent of a
natural phenomenon.
In the second part of this account, "The Peyotl Dance,"
we see him attending "the cataclysm which is his own body"
among the ritual dances of the Indians who have grated the peyotl
for him. The mind of Antonin Artaud rises above
Antonin Artaud's body. And he undergoes every agony of the
split personality, even to the point of craving purification by fire,
death at the stake: "To this, I knew, my physical destiny was
irremediably bound. I was ready for every agony of burning, and
I awaited the first fruits of the flames, in view of a total
combustion."
Here Antonin Artaud makes way for the person he calls

familiarly enough, Artaud-le-Momo (in his native Marseille, "le
momo" means "the madman"). And we pass, to borrow the terms
already consecrated by the alchemists, from Artaud's "white
period" to his "black period." To cross the threshold, to take the
plunge, to change worlds--these paltry metaphors
156 MAURICE SAILLET
do not explain how Antonin Artaud, following Nerval and
Baudelaire, Holderlin and Nietzsche, found himself on the other
side of the frontiers man must not cross, under penalty of no
longer being recognized by his fellow-men.
It was during his return from a trip to Ireland that the terrible
label insane was attached to his name, apparently as a result of
the zeal of the medical officer and the captain of the ship on
which he was forcibly taken at Dublin. The label remained for the
nine years he spent in the asylums of Scotteville-les-Rouen,
Sainte-Anne, Ville-Evrard, Chezal-Benoit, and Rodez. He lost
even his name as a poet: Le Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras
was published anonymously --no one knows why--in the August
1, 1937 number of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. Two years had
to pass before it was acknowledged, by publication of a letter
from Artaud to Adrienne Monnier, that he was the author. The
only word from him during almost the entirety of his confinement
was Les Nouvelles Revelations de l'Etre, published in 1937, also
anonymously, by Editions Denoel. It opens with this poem of the
Double, of which I quote the beginning and the conclusion:
I say what I have seen and what I believe; and I shall attack
whoever says I have not seen what I have seen.
For I am a relentless Brute, and it shall be ever thus until
Time is no longer Time.
Neither Heaven nor Hell, if they exist, can avail against the
brutality they have imposed upon me, perhaps so that I
may serve them. . . Who knows? In any case, so that I may be
torn apart. That which is, I can see with certitude. That which is
not, I
shall perform, if I must.
It is a man in real Despair who speaks to you and who knows

the happiness of being in the world only now that he has
abandoned this world, now that he is absolutely separated from
it.
Dead, the others are not separated. They still revolve around
their corpses. .
I am not dead, but I am separated.

In the horoscope of the Tarot cards, in which Artaud
prophesies total Destruction-"but Conscious and in Revolt" -what
is striking is the fury of his expression, so characteristic of the
entire "black period." This new mental world, shot through with
scorching or icy blasts, is a theater of unknown rites. Yet we are
carried through it by the wave of mounting fury, and we dread its
breaking upon us like the downpour of a sacred tempest.
The Lettres de Rodez (1945), addressed to Henri Parisot (who
gave Artaud the great pleasure of seeing Le Voyage au Pays des
Tarahumaras published at last), take us into the real life of
Revelation. If we are unconcerned with the sorcery and spells of
which Artaud feels himself the victim and against which he
struggles so tragically, we are nevertheless affected by the
frenzied movement of his language, which attacks our
sensibilities with irresistible immediacy. Now that the thunderbolt
has fallen, there is between Artaud and ourselves only the
dividing pane of the innocence we have lost, the experience we
shall never have. We are shamed by the thought that for so many
years there should have been another kind of "separation. "
In 1946 Antonin Artaud resumed his place among us. His
friends celebrated the occasion: the homage paid at the Theatre
Sarah-Bernhardt will not be forgotten. Among the many notable
persons who made a point of being there, I shall mention only
Charles Dullin, Colette Thomas, Roger Blin, Jean Vilar, and Jean-
Louis Barrault. Others were apparently "separated" from the man
they were celebrating by
158 MAURICE SAILLET
what is called success, sanity, literary (or simply Parisian)

ambition--none of which could pass the test of purity constituted
by the work Antonin Artaud had lived.
Between his release from the asylum at Rodez and that other
"release" which he refused to call death, Artaud, at liberty, did a
great deal of drawing and writing. He knew to within a few days
when he was to leave us: the work he left us knew it too, perhaps.
The fragments which have appeared here and there, in magazines
or in books of a rather confidential aspect, permit our judgment
little scope. It is an understatement to say that his oeuvre seems to
us a major event: the extent of such a storm and the effectiveness
of its destructions can only be measured with the passing of time.
To confine myself to what we can know of the immediate
present, I shall list Antonin Artaud's last manifestations-which
were also the last great joys of the man we loved and admired:
His contribution to the Lautreamont issue of Cahiers du Sud,
in which he expresses, in the last section, the refusal of that breed
of minds reaching from Poe to himself to serve as a "funnel for
everyone else's ideas."
His lecture at the Vieux-Colombier, when he first recited "Le
Retour d' Artaud-le-Momo," "Centre Mere et Patron Minet," "La
Culture Indienne," "L'Insulte a l'Inconditionne" --and then told
the audience about himself in such a way as to inspire Andre Gide
to write the following in the magazine 84: "We had just seen a
wretched. man, a man excruciatingly tortured by a god, as if on
the threshold of a deep cave, the sibyl's secret grotto in which
nothing profane is tolerated, or as if, on some poetic Mount
Carmel, a vales had been exposed, offered to the thunderbolts, to
devouring vultures--a man both priest and victim. . . . One felt
ashamed to resume one's place in a world where comfort consists
of compromises."
His "encounter" with Van Gogh (during the great exhibition at
the Orangerie) which he recorded in that little book
full of the whirling suns that drove them both to despair: Van
Gogh le Suicide de la Societe.
His exhibition, at the Galerie Pierre, of portraits which are not
works of art, but which attempt to express "the ancient human
history" imprisoned in the human face.
His recording for radio of Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de
Dieu, with the assistance of Roger Blin, Maria Casares, and Paule
Thevenin.
And lastly, the publication of Ci-Git, a poem as open as a
grave, and of Artaud-le-Momo, which is not a poem but an
immense "humbled cry" that "disgorges reality"--and serves,
perhaps, as a prelude to a new state of health.
How much Artaud would have enjoyed seeing the first volume
of his oeuvres completes published! On the eve of his death, he
was expecting the proofs of this substantial book, which he had
sent to his publisher a year and a half before.
Besides Suppots et Supplications, a three-hundred page
compilation that may well comprise the principle work of his
"black period," several supplementary chapters to the Tara-
humaras, and a new essay on "The Theater of Cruelty," Artaud
left an impressive amount of manuscript notebooks and a large
number of letters, in which the features of Jacques Riviere's
correspondent are further revealed and accentuated.
Those who were his friends will tell us what sort of man
Antonin Artaud was. I had only approached him occasionally, yet
the look in his eyes is still vivid to my own. And the "Nervalian"
grace of his presence, rendering all the more poignant the tragic
assurance of his powers of Revelation, remains with me like a
secret effusion.
(1948)
.Translated by Richard Howard

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The Theater

and Its Double

Translated from the French by

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 58-9910

0102 4544 43 42 4140 39 38

A Note on the Translation 6

VI. No More Masterpieces VII. 74

The Theater and Cruelty 84

VIII. The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto) . 89

IX. Letters on Cruelty. 101

X. Letters on Language 105

XI. The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto) 122

This translation faithfully follows the text of the Le Theatre et

Never before, when it is life itself that is in question, has there

This said, we can begin to form an idea of culture, an idea

only to seduce and direct a force which, in music, would

The archives of the little town of Cagliari, in Sardinia, contain the

The plague of 1720 in Marseille has yielded us the only so-

In 1880 or so, a French doctor by the name of Yersin, working

*1 Scipio Nasica, grand pontiff, who ordered the theaters of Rome to be

. Like the plague, the theater is a formidable call to the forces

In the Louvre there is a work by a primitive painter, known or

The contemporary theater is decadent because it has lost the

In a Marx Brothers' film a man thinks he is going to take a

There is a mysterious identity of essence between the principle of

and form, concrete and abstract, and to dissolve all appearances

The spectacle of the Balinese theater, which draws upon dance,

It is a theater which eliminates tile-author in favor of what we

In a spectacle like that of Balinese theater there is something

There is a low hum of instinctual matters in this theater, but

Of this idea of pure theater, which is merely theoretical in the

One senses in the Balinese theater a state prior to language and

It is certain that this aspect of pure theater, this physics .of

That intellectual space, psychic interplay, and silence solidified

In the performances of the Balinese theater the mind has the

This perpetual play of mirrors passing from color to gesture

What occurs as a highly colored reference to physical im-

There is an absolute in these constructed perspectives, a real

Everything in this theater is immersed in a profound in-

Their gestures fall so accurately upon this rhythm of the

And the women's stratified, lunar eyes:

Utter satisfaction from these dance gestures, from these

We are watching a mental alchemy which makes a gesture of

The Balinese theater has revealed to us a physical and nonverbal

One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we

We cannot go on prostituting the idea of theater whose only value

Put in this way, the question of the theater ought to arouse

To J. P. Paris, September 13, 1932

To J. P. Paris, November 14, 1932

To M. R. de R Paris, November 16, 1932

To M. B. C. Paris, September 15, 1931

Ta J. P. Paris, September 28, 1932

P.S.--The author must discover and assume what belongs to the

To J. Po Paris, November 9, 1932

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF CONTENT

that is, of the subjects and themes to be treated: