Antonin Artaud, founder of the Theater of Cruelty, was ostensibly expelled from the surrealist movement for the frivolity of his theatrical focus, but his deviation from the surrealist ideals was at heart about the collective nature of that movement. As one reviews the artistic movements of the period, ‘isms’ fall into place – surrealism, futurism, Dadaism, vorticism… and then Artaud, just Artaud. Given the role that those artistic movements played in their political counterparts like socialism and facism, Artaud emerges as a distinct, solitary figure. The vision of his manifestos is to punch through the skin of reality toward something metaphysical, wiping out the mind and the intellect through the shock of physical cruelty. He focuses solely on the world within an individual, a vivid contrast to the Communist Manifesto’s drive toward collective social change. As the surrealists increasingly began to ally themselves with the Third International and the socialist movement, the disparity between their ideals and Artaud’s became starkly visible.

Disassociation and separation are the keys to Artaud’s artistic vision, even in the incongruities and contradictions within his own rhetoric. Perpetually struggling with the mind-body duality, Artaud flips from the declaration of war against the Mind in The Umbilical Limbo to a marginally unifying theory in his Theater of Cruelty, then back to the desire for a neutral void-state in which the mind does not exist. In The Umbilical Limbo, written in 1925 with Jet of Blood, he declares: “I suffer because the Mind is not in life and life is not the Mind. I suffer because the Mind is an organ, the Mind is an interpreter or the Mind intimidates things to accept them in the Mind… We must get rid of the Mind, just as we must get rid of literature.”¹ For Artaud, the Mind represented an artificial control of life, a censorship where the Mind altered things to suit its logic. Literature was the ultimate example of the Mind’s logic, constrained by the inescapable structure of words and meaningless in the search for lifeness. Poetry, in contrast, broke those rules of logic in its use of words. “Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which, through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the disruption of known relationships,” Artaud wrote approvingly.² Artaud was seeking to eliminate the mind through the destruction of all paths of logic, a perfect anarchy emerging out of chaos.

Reference to these early writings of Artaud illuminates the subtext of the Theater of Cruelty, because his stated, explicit goal is to reach the mind through the body, which seems to suggest unification. “In our present degenerative state, metaphysics must be made to enter the mind through the body,” he declared in the First Manifesto, and adds in The Theater and Cruelty, “One cannot separate body and mind, nor the senses from the intellect, particularly in a field where the unendingly repeated jading of our organs calls for sudden shocks to revive our understanding.”³ In light of The Umbilical Limbo, one begins to understand that he seeks to reach the mind through the body in order to eliminate it. He hoped to achieve this through theater in the sense that theater was a culture of space, rather than just of words: “Culture in space means culture of a mind which never stops breathing and feeling alive in space and which summons up the bodies of space like the very objects of its thought, but which, as far as the mind is concerned, is located in the dead center of space, in other words, in a neutral void.”⁴ He quotes Tao te King of Lao-Tseu with the proverb: “Thirty spokes meet in the center, but it’s the void in the middle which makes the wheel go round.”⁵ This quest for void, a state of non-existence, occurs over and over again in his writings, but he always focuses on the world within an individual. Even while glorifying the Balinese theater, he ignores the political and cultural roots of “Oriental theater” and fixates on their ability to unify their senses and reach a universal absolute. He addresses exclusively the evolution within an individual, never the evolution of societies.

In extreme contrast, the rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto is based exclusively on plurality. The manifesto speaks only of vast collectives, bourgeoisie against proletarians, anywhere and everywhere: “In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties…In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” ⁶ The essence of the socialist and communist movements is the idea that the rights of individuals are subordinate to the good of society, whether economically or politically. There is no singular first person in the Communist Manifesto, only pluralities – we and they, us and them.

The Third International grounds this movement in Russia, but maintains the vast sweep of rhetoric. Lenin declared during the First Congress that: “The entire, seemingly omnipotent, union of the bourgeoisie of the whole world… seem to be scared stiff that a ten or a dozen Bolsheviks will infect the whole world. But we, of course, know that this fear is ridiculous – because they have already infected the whole world.”⁷ He establishes an origin point in the Russian workers’ struggle, but the ultimate goal of socialist strategy is to reach workers everywhere.

Although they were associated through the surrealist movement, the Third International and Antonin Artaud have entirely separate goals and worldviews – they are not even polar opposites, because they share elements like the preference of violence over pacifism – “civil war, not civil peace”, as Lenin declared – and the idea of universal truths. However, they are fundamentally independent of each other. Socialist strategy focuses on social change, on collective action, and Artaud’s strategy is one of void, of ultimate isolation. The two do not connect, which might have been the reason that their link through surrealism disintegrated soon after its creation. The surrealists, led by André Breton, leaned toward the Third International, and expelled Artaud to go his own way.

Breton expelled Artaud presumably because of the frivolity of his role in the theater, but as Martin Puchner explains: “This antitheatrical rhetoric, too, can be seen as part of Breton’s attempt to reduce the theatricality of the avant-garde and of the manifesto in favor of something more effective, instrumental, and efficacious.”⁸ Breton was focusing on effecting social change, like the Third International, and forming a collective. In the surrealist manifesto’s reworking of the past and present, Breton creates a collective out of great artists of the past. “’Swift is a Surrealist in malice / Sade is Surrealist in sadism… Poe is surrealist in adventure. / Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality…’ For surrealism this prehistory contains partial or incomplete surrealist authors, presented in a list that could presumably go on forever, ‘etc.’”⁹ In an act of retrospective creation, Breton forges together his collective to give the surrealist movement the authenticity of historical roots – ignoring the authenticity of his own reworkings.

Oriented toward bonding things together, Breton was unsettled by Artaud’s drive toward a permanent disassociation.  Speaking after Artaud’s death, Breton commented that, “The space that Artaud led me into always strikes me as an abstract, a hall of mirrors… It’s a place of lacunae and ellipses in which, personally, I lose all my means of communication with the innumerable things that, despite everything, give me pleasure and bind me to this earth.”¹⁰ Artaud’s realm was that of the metaphysical, the indescribable – completely unlike the practical, instrumental force of the surrealist manifestos.

Within the history of surrealism and the Third International, Artaud stands out as a solitary dissenting voice. Where socialist strategies were moving toward effecting social change and forging a collective, Artaud was searching for a perfect, permanent void-state that would separate him from everything in a Heideggerian sense, disconnecting Being and World. Near the end of his life, he even abandoned the idea of applying his goals to anyone else; it became a personal quest. The end of both movements illustrates the fundamental divide between collective and individual – the surrealist movement decentralized and spread all over the globe, and Artaud, released from the institute at Rodez for his last two years, died alone of an overdose of chloral.

² Schumacher & Singleton, 84.

³ Schumacher & Singleton, 117, 122.

⁴Schumacher & Singleton, 149.

⁵ Schumacher & Singleton, 149.
⁶Marx.

⁷ Lenin.
⁸ Puchner, 186.

⁹ Puchner, 185.

¹⁰ Scheer, 13.

Sources

Lenin, V.I. “Founding of the Communist International.” The Communist International. Moscow. March 6,1919. V.I. Lenin Internet Archive. 2002. <www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/06.htm>

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. London, 1848. The Australian National University. <http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html>

Puchner, Martin. “Surrealism, Latent and Manifest.” Poetry of the Revolution. Princeton University Press. (Princeton, 2006).

Scheer, Edward. Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader. Routledge. (London, 2004.)

Schumacher, Claude & Brian Singleton, eds. Artaud on Theater. Ivan R. Dee. (Chicago, 2001.)