Antonin Artaud Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature Published in association with the Centre for Modern European Literature, University of Kent, UK Series Editors: Thomas Baldwin, Ben Hutchinson, Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller Editorial Advisory Board: Brian Boyd, Michael Caeser, Claus Clüver, Patrick ffrench, Alison Finch, Robert Gordon, Karen Leeder, Marjorie Perloff, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Andrew Michael Roberts, Ritchie Robertson, Hubert van den Berg Many of the most significant modern European writers and literary movements have tra- versed national, linguistic and discipli-nary borders. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature is dedicated to publishing works that take account of these various kinds of border crossing. Areas covered by the series include European Romanticism, the avant-garde, mod- ernism and postmodernism, literary theory, the international reception of modern European writers, and the impact of other discourses (philosophical, political, psychoanalytic and scientific) upon modern European literature. Titles include: Thomas Baldwin, James Fowler and Ana de Medeiros (editors) QUESTIONS OF INFLUENCE IN MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE Ros Murray ANTONIN ARTAUD The Scum of the Soul Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (editors) MODERNIST EROTICISMS European Literature After Sexology Claire White WORK AND LEISURE IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE AND VISUAL CULTURE Time, Politics and Class David Williams WRITING POSTCOMMUNISM Towards a Literature of the East European Ruins Forthcoming titles: Larry Duffy FLAUBERT, ZOLA AND THE INCORPORATION OF DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE Righting the Epistemological Body Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–02455–8 (hardback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Antonin Artaud The Scum of the Soul Ros Murray Queen Mary University of London © Ros Murray 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-31057-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-45670-3 ISBN 978-1-137-31058-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137310583 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murray, Ros, 1982– author. Antonin Artaud : the scum of the soul / Ros Murray. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes fi lmography. ISBN 978–1–137–31057–6 1. Artaud, Antonin, 1896–1948 —Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ2601.R677Z7426 2014 848'.91209—dc23 2014022064 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. For my brother Patrick Contents List of Illustrations viii Series Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1 1 The Limits of Representation 10 2 Through the Digestive System 36 3 Theatre, Magic and Mimesis 58 4 Artaud on Film 87 5 Artaud on Paper 117 6 The Machinic Body 140 Conclusion 163 Notes 167 Bibliography 183 Filmography 187 Index 188 vii List of Illustrations 3.1 Artaud, Antonin, Sort remis à Roger Blin. Signed, not dated (estimated 22nd May 1939) © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014. 83 5.1 Artaud, Antonin, La Maladresse sexuelle de dieu. Signed bottom right, not dated (estimated February 1946) © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014. 128 6.1 Artaud, Antonin, page from notebook number 310 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014. 150 viii Series Editors’ Preface Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements in the modern period have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature series is to create a forum for work that takes account of these border crossings, and that engages with individual writers, genres, topoi and literary movements in a manner that does justice to their loca- tion within European artistic, political and philosophical contexts. Of course, the title of this series immediately raises a number of questions, at once historical, geopolitical and literary-philosophical: What are the parameters of the modern? What is to be understood as European, both politically and culturally? And what distinguishes literature within these historical and geopolitical limits from other forms of discourse? These three questions are interrelated. Not only does the very idea of the modern vary depending on the European national tradition within which its definition is attempted, but the concept of literature in the modern sense is also intimately connected to the emergence and consolidation of the European nation-states, to increasing secu- larisation, urbanisation, industrialisation and bureaucratisation, to the Enlightenment project and its promise of emancipation from nature through reason and science, to capitalism and imperialism, to the lib- eral-democratic model of government, to the separation of the private and public spheres, to the new form taken by the university, and to changing conceptions of both space and time as a result of technologi- cal innovations in the fields of travel and communication. Taking first the question of when the modern may be said to com- mence within a European context, if one looks to a certain Germanic tradition shaped by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), then it might be said to commence with the first ‘theoretical man’, namely Socrates. According to this view, the modern would include everything that comes after the pre-Socratics and the first two great Attic tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, with Euripides being the first modern writer. A rather more limited sense of the modern, also derived from the Germanic world, sees the Neuzeit as originating in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Jakob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague at the University of Basel, identified the states of Renaissance Italy as prototypes for both modern European politics and modern ix x Series Editors’ Preface European cultural production. However, Italian literary modernity might also be seen as having commenced two hundred years earlier, with the programmatic adoption of the vernacular by its foremost rep- resentatives, Dante and Petrarch. In France, the modern might either be seen as beginning at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, with the so-called ‘Querelle des anciens et des modernes’ in the 1690s, or later still, with the French Revolution of 1789, while the Romantic generation of the 1830s might equally be identified as an origin, given that Chateaubriand is often credited with having coined the term modernité in 1833. Across the Channel, meanwhile, the origins of literary modernity might seem different again. With the Renaissance being seen as ‘Early Modern’, everything thereafter might seem to fall within the category of the modern, although in fact the term ‘modern’ within a literary context is generally reserved for the literature that comes after mid-nineteenth- century European realism. This latter sense of the modern is also present in the early work of Roland Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero (1953) asserts that modern literature commences in the 1850s, when the liter- ary becomes explicitly self-reflexive, not only addressing its own status as literature but also concerning itself with the nature of language and the possibilities of representation. In adopting a view of the modern as it pertains to literature that is more or less in line with Barthes’s periodisation, while also acknowledg- ing that this periodization is liable to exceptions and limitations, the present series does not wish to conflate the modern with, nor to limit it to, modernism and postmodernism. Rather, the aim is to encourage work that highlights differences in the conception of the modern – dif- ferences that emerge out of distinct linguistic, national and cultural spheres within Europe – and to prompt further reflection on why it should be that the concept of the modern has become such a critical issue in ‘modern’ European culture, be it aligned with Enlightenment progress, with the critique of Enlightenment thinking, with decadence, with radical renewal, or with a sense of belatedness. Turning to the question of the European, the very idea of modern literature arises in conjunction with the establishment of the European nation-states. When European literatures are studied at university, they are generally taught within national and linguistic parameters: English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Slavic and Eastern European, and Spanish literature. Even if such disciplinary distinc- tions have their pedagogical justifications, they render more difficult an appreciation of the ways in which modern European literature