Antonin Artaud was a difficult guy to get along with. It didn't take too much of him to be too much for anyone.
He was a surrealist for a time, but not even the surrealists knew what to do with him. And that boded ill for Antonin. I mean, if you can’t get along with surrealists, you know you’ve got a sociability problem. You’re destined to spend a lot of time alone.
Artaud only lived to be 51, took a lot of drugs, spent years confined to a mental hospital, and received brutal electroshock treatments. He was often poor, hungry, and practically homeless, in addition to being a drug addict, but he still somehow managed to get a lot accomplished.
He went to Mexico for a time and became obsessed with the Aztecs. He traveled to Ireland and thought he’d procured a walking stick belonging to St. Patrick, Lucifer, and Jesus. Yes, all three! He was obsessed with the infamously perverse Roman emperor Elagabalus. He wrote a novel about him. I read it once but it wasn’t nearly as shocking as I’d hoped.
He believed in magic spells and that to live was to suffer. But not, apparently, that magic could alleviate suffering. Or, at least, not in any significant way. He was very sex-phobic. Whenever a baby was born, he took it personally as a direct assault on his life.
He came up with the idea of The Theater of Cruelty. He thought of it as a way to return theater to its original sacred purpose. Theater, Artaud believed, shouldn’t create illusions, but shatter them. He wanted to provoke a visceral catharsis in his audience. He didn’t want them “settling in” and enjoying the evening. He wanted to scare the living shit out of them. He wanted to shatter their illusions, not just on the stage, but in their very lives. He wanted to bring them face to face with the “horror” of reality. Most people going to the theater want to see stuff like Cats or Jersey Boys. They don't want to be shaken up. They want to enjoy a pleasant evening. Artaud was never going to be Andrew Lloyd Weber. Still, Artaud’s ideas on theater have been very influential. Some of them have even survived to this day.
Antonin Artaud once wrote “All writing is pigshit.” But he couldn’t give it up; he wrote obsessively. That must have been very galling to him.
He was a real doll when he was young. He was even a silent movie actor. He looked like an angel. But he was definitely not a guy who died young and left a beautiful corpse. By the time he passed away, he looked like a zombie. A hard life and colorectal cancer took a terrible toll on him.
He was found dead, sitting on the end of a bed, holding a shoe, as if he still had somewhere to go.
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