Antonin Artaud, selected writings

Authors:Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (Editor, Writer of introduction), Helen Weaver (Translator), Don Eric Levine

Summary:"Antonin Artaud is 'one of the great, daring mapmakers of consciousness in extremis, ' writes Susan Sontag. 'His work and presence reside on the boundary between being and non-being, art and non-art, reasoning and screaming. He proposes a new mode of thinking and of art--even as he simultaneously proclaims and demonstrates their impossibility.' The writings of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) include verse; prose poems; essays on cinema, art, and literature; diatribes and polemics on the theater; six film scenarios; a historical novel; several plays; and a large number of letters. From this vast corpus, collected in the nine-volume Gallimard edition, Susan Sontag has drawn a selection that encompasses this singular writer, a writer who intended to produce a revolution in thought and whose work is indeed the inspiration for many radical thinkers and artists of the new generation. The recent manifestations of his Theater of Cruelty are only one sign of Artaud's growing influence on the anarchistically-minded and the young. 'Words are a morass explained, not by existence, but by suffering.' Impelled by his suffering, Artaud wrote with genius, power, authority, and accuracy, and the explication of his mental state became his dominant, inexhaustible subject. As he put it, 'I am the man who has best charted his inmost self.' The charts he left--stressing individual creation, the extension of consciousness, the intuitive--will inevitably be consulted by revolutionaries of the future. The translation is by Helen Weaver, who also rendered Artaud's The Peyote Dance. The book concludes with a 66-page section of notes by Susan Sontag and Don Eric Levine."--Jacket