Artaud and His Doubles (review)

Reviewed by: Artaud and His Doubles Stephen Barker Kimberley Jannarone . Artaud and His Doubles. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. 272. $55.00 (Hb). It is impossible to over-state the impact of the "apparition phénoménale," as Derrida calls Artaud (18), the event of Artaud, on contemporary theatre and contemporary arts in general. From Jim Morrison to Julian Beck to Peter Brook to Charles Bukowski, Artaud shone a blinding light on the nature of performance, the embodied sensorium, and its relation to thought within the context of a physical determination to shatter false reality and reveal the dynamic passion of a Nietzschean Lebenskraft, the life force that can only be expressed through gesture. Again like Nietzsche, [End Page 417] Artaud was both the most and least political of artists; perhaps both might best be called polemical psychologists whose politics took the form of shocking, confrontational images and ideas. Both Nietzsche and Artaud vilified political activism as absurd in the corrupt worlds they saw around them. Protest, most certainly; politics, no: they chose parallel worlds, and their goals were nothing less than the fullest exploration of the depths (and heights) of the relation of their own physiologies to will, fate, and lived experience. It is, thus, fairly difficult to see Artaud, any more than Nietzsche, as a proto-fascist obsessed with accruing and exercising power in the conventional sense of crowd-control: in the case of Artaud, as a megalomaniacal theatre director obsessed with mass-manipulation. This is Kimberley Jannarone's claim in Artaud and His Doubles: that, with regard to Artaud's "interwar writings," chiefly The Theatre and Its Double, reception and interpretation of this work has been "inadequate, if indeed not inappropriate" because it has not been seen in light of the "political, intellectual, and theatrical climate of its time" (2). The "decoder ring" (x) for this work, she claims, is "crowd theory," which reveals the "reactionary, fascistic tendency that is undeniably present and provocatively under-estimated in Artaud's writings" (xi). But as Jannarone herself points out, Artaudian "cruelty" has to do not with crowds or masses but with the invasion of the solitary audience member by the forces of cruel theatre. For Artaud, despite a good deal of hyperbolic language that must be read as a tactic in a larger strategy of disorientation, this cruelty relates to living, vital force; certainly, not to morality. Yet Jannarone's case is precisely that Artaudian theatre "is the time of evil [le mal]" (37) that destroys not only old, ossified theatrical forms but also the will of all to resist a new controlling authority, the director (Artaud). It is true that Artaud calls the power of the doubled theatre "le mal" (with all the complexities and echoes of this word in French) - but in the same letter, though the passage is not quoted by Jannarone, he says that I employ the word "cruelty" in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness, in the sense of that pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue; good is desired, it is the consequence of an act; evil is permanent. (102-3) Here Artaud lays out the Manichean dialectics that, he says, governs human existence: "in the practice of cruelty there is a kind of higher determinism . . . ; cruelty is above all lucid . . . It is consciousness" (Artaud 102). This is not "evil" but the impossible cruelty of full consciousness, the inescapable consciousness of the sublime, of and in the ecstatic - consciousness [End Page 418] of being in ecstasy. This kind of transport is possible for human beings only as a concept, not as a "real" state. It can only be defined and codified when one is not in it but observing it: an ineffable state understood by Artaud as a fragile and dynamic "core" unreached by forms. The distinction Artaud makes throughout The Theatre and Its Double is thus not a fascistic one but the Nietzschean one, between form and force; this is the context in which "good" and "evil" must also be seen. Having drawn a connection between...

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