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A Letter on Artaud

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2022

Paule Thévenin
Translated by
Bettina Knapp
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Type
Letter
Information
Tulane Drama Review , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Spring 1965 , pp. 99 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 The Tulane Drama Review

References

1 This visit was preceded by the visit of Jean DubufEet and his wife in 1945.

2 In 1959 Madame Malausstaa, Artaud's sister, complained about Dr. Ferdière's action. She wrote in the December, 1959 issue of La tour de feu: “But in 1946, some people decided to ask Dr. Ferdière for Antonin Artaud's release under the guise of assuming responsibility for him. This was done with unabashed impudence—the poet's mother was not informed of the request. The freedom was granted. The poet was lost from that time on.” Artaud always spoke in malicious terms about Mme. Malausséna, calling her “my so-called sister” or “my wouldbe sister,” or “that person who claims to be my sister,” etc. He frequently affirmed and was completely faithful to his desire of rejecting all notion of filiation and this is very pronounced in the beginning of Ci-Gît:

I, Antonin Artaud, I am my son,
my father, my mother,
and me;
leveller of the imbecilic periplus in which
engendering is caught up,
the periplus papa-mama,
the child,
soot from grand-mama's ass,
much more than from papa-mama's…

3 Artaud did not, incidently, read those sentences. He read The Sick and Doctors:

Sickness is a state,
health is only another,
more rotten,
I mean more cowardly and more petty.
Never was there a sick one who did not grow
never a well one who did not one day betray, because
he never wanted to be sick, like certain doctors
I've had to put up with….

Several days later, he realized, ironically, what his appearance at the Club d'Essai had been like: he said to me with a glitter in his eyes: “I wanted to hear myself; it was frightful! I thought I was listening to Albert Lambert.” (Albert Lambert was an actor at the Comédie-Française. He rang out his lines in the Mounet-Sully tradition. He was Sarah Bernhardt's partner.)

4 See this issue of TDR, pp. 60-82 for complete text of this radio play.

5 La tour de feu (December, 1959).

6 ntonin Artaud had wanted Le Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras (The Journey to the Land of the Tarahumaras) to be published anonymously, as Les Nouvelles Revelations de l'Être (The New Revelations of Being) had been. “My name must disappear,” he had written to Jean Paulhan. Indeed, the text was published in the Nouvelle Revue Française without the author's name.

7 Published in TDR, Volume VIII, Number 2 (T22), pp. 57-60.