| Popis: |
In August 1946 Antonin Artaud, having returned to Paris after nine years internment in a psychiatric hospital, wrote the preface-preambule--to his collected works, which were to be published by Gallimard.' Artaud used this occasion to speak of the beginnings of his writing, characterizing the point of departure for his unique experience with language-an experience that would later lead him to the languages of the theatre-as follows: "As far as I was concerned, the problem was not to find out what might manage to worm its way into the strictures of written language, but into the web of my living soul" (OC I*:8; 1961, I:18). And he outlined in further detail his search for "words which would enable me to enter the grain of this squint-eyed flesh (I say SQUINT-EYED [Torve], but in Greek it is called tavaturi, and tavaturi means noise, etc.)" (OC I*:8; 1961, I:18). Artaud asked how the force, tension, pressure of words-and their suppression in written language-might be made palpable in writing without being sublated in the process of reception by socially conditioned thought. That is why it was so important to him that the word also speak to the body, in the sense of making the body audible as sound or noise: tavaturi. This search led Artaud in the 192os and 1930s to the theatre and to the concept of the "theatre of cruelty," which he developed most extensively in Le theitre et son double (1938). By the time Artaud wrote the preface in 1946, it had become more important than ever for him to emphasize that cruelty-cruaute--did not simply imply a commensurate representation of cruelty |
