Antonin Artaud

Poet. Actor. Playwright. Theoretician. Artist. Orientalist. Surrealist. Asylum inmate. Drug addict. Electroshock recipient. Antonin Artaud.In this biography of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic personalities and idiosyncratic thinkers, David A. Shafer takes readers on a chronological voyage through Artaud's life. Yet, as Artaud navigated through the first half of the century in the company of many of France's most influential cultural figures, his own journey was a lonely and largely isolated one, an existential ellipsis.In spite of being born into the material comfort of a bourgeois family from Marseille, Artaud - in both his existence and his work - uncompromisingly rejected those very bourgeois values and norms. Forsaking the renown he had garnered as a stage and film actor, theatre director and published author of The Theatre and its Double and many other writings, Artaud relentlessly challenged contemporary assumptions on the superiority of the West, the functioning of speech and the purpose of culture. In his mind, if not his deeds, he incarnated France's revolutionary tradition. Though conflicted by his inability to align his thoughts with his words, disoriented by his incessant demand for narcotics, and debilitated by increasing paranoia, Artaud channeled his intense alienation into an assault on social and cultural conventions through theatre, poetry, essays and art. Preserving the profundity of Artaud's words without trivializing their complexity, and situating them within his frenetic life, this book is a compelling and fresh interpretation of Artaud and his continuing cultural reverberations.