Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period

by Antonin Artaud, Clayton Eshleman (Editor, Translator, Introduction), Bernard Bador (Editor)

This is the first new English language anthology of Artaud's writing in nearly twenty years, and reflects an increased interest in his late work (a show of Artaud's visual art from this period was on view at MOMA throughout 1961). Clayton Eshleman's translations have won widespread acclaim, including a National Book Award.

Genres: Poetry, France, Art, Fiction, Theatre, Literature, Essays

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

French surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud advocated a deliberately shocking and confrontational style of drama that he called "theater of cruelty."

People better knew Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, an essayist, actor, and director.

Considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern theory, Antonin Artaud associated with artists and experimental groups in Paris during the 1920s.

Political differences then resulted in him breaking and founding the theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together, they expected to create a forum for works to change radically. Artaud especially expressed disdain for west of the day, panned the ordered plot and scripted language that his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and recorded his ideas in such works as Le Theatre de la cruaute and The Theatre and Its Double .

Artaud thought to represent reality and to affect the much possible audience and therefore used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements.

Artaud wanted that the "spectacle" that "engulfed and physically affected" this audience, put in the middle. He referred to this layout like a "vortex," a "trapped and powerless" constantly shifting shape.

Reviews

[Autoclette]

For those who have seen the void.

[Jamie Cooper]

Who am I?
Where do I come from?
I am Antonin Artaud
and if I say it
as I know how to say it
immediately
you will see my present body
fly into pieces
and under ten thousand
notorious aspects
a new body
will be assembled
in which you will never again
be able
to forget me.

[Jack]

Antonin Artaud is a very strange author at any period of his life, but at the very end of it - the final period that this book covers - he has truly descended into the depths of his own delirium. Electroshock and opium, schizophrenia untreated for years and the undernourishment and abuses that came from life in a series of uncaring asylums had reduced him to this: the unnerving artwork that dons the cover of this book and the ravings inside. Too often work from the final period of Artaud's life has gone untranslated, and largely denied any true regard. But is that a fair assessment?

What's to be found in this book is a man attempting to put his mind back together, and the strange ways in which he does so. This book is a cry for meaning, sometimes finding it, sometimes not, and the very alchemical act of attempting to create new languages, new ways of expression when all else was failing him.

While I would hesitate to recommend this book to anyone unfamiliar with Artaud, and indeed understand why this work has been ignored for as long as it has, I do think it has meaning. It has interest, and through the dregs of delirium at times there are passages that truly chill the bones. This is fascinating, very much of its time, and influential in ways that still haven't fully been understood in the development of the 60s artistic movements. Artaud lives on, at times in strange ways, and I'm sure of that he would have been - if not proud - then perhaps grateful. Grateful that even now we're still seeking to understand.

[Spencer]

This book provides a fascinating insight in to the mind of a disturbed man, who channelled his mental anguish into surreal writings that are unlike anything I've ever read. Antonin Artaud's work is vulgar, confusing and incoherent but it's also hypnotically compelling, and the brilliant introduction by Clayton Eshleman was insightful and helped me divine some insight into Antonin's work.

[Steven Logan]

This confuses the hell out of me, and I'm thankful for that.

[tout]

From the thin line between genius and madness that Artaud had often walked enigmatically, he appears to have left the line completely during this period, in the process of becoming "suicided by society", meditating on alchemy, and myth, Nerval's hanging himself by street lamp being more than just a bit foretelling. He never ceases, though, in being both a genius and mad.

"There is no inside, no spirit, outside or consciousness, nothing but
the body as it may be seen, a body that does not cease being, even when
the eye that sees it falls.
And that body is a fact.
Me."

[clinamen]

“To confront the metaphysics I created for myself, in accordance with the void I carry within me.”

[Benjamin]

My advise is be in a good place mentally before reading this. Otherwise, intensely compelling.

[Aaron Schuschu]

I couldn’t find Artaud’s To Have Done With Judgement of God by itself on here, so I used this book as a place marker in its stead. THDWJOG, in addition to being extremely anti- religious to the point of scatological polemics and erroneously connecting it to the imperialism of American foreign and domestic policy, THDWJOG also demonstrates that Artaud was the first casualty of the current moral twilight.

[kate]

i liked some of it.

i read the french version of each poem wherever it was available because i liked it better.

[Michelle Johnson]

Assigned for Poetry for Majors, SP09, Johannes Goransson

[Zach]

In high school (and now) I thought Antonin Artaud was so fucking hot. If you think Rimbaud is sexy, you have groomer tendencies... Wes Anderson secondary character ass crush lol

[Benjamin]

"No philosophy, no question, no being,
no nothingness, no refusal, no maybe-be

as for the rest

to crap, to crap;

STRIP THE CRUST
FROM THE BROWSED BREAD;

. . .

That point where it was necessary to choose between renouncing being
a man and becoming an obvious madman.

But what guarantee do the obvious mad men of this world have of being
nursed by the authentically living?"

This text is a wonderful collection of late-Artaud. It opens with a diligent introduction and closes with a brief, but fair notes section. One is forced to think sensibly and non-sensibly to read this text. Enjoy!

[Donald Armfield]

Artaud’s work screams a language of a fallen mind. These essays, poems and letters are pieces of thought progression that racks our own brain of an understanding. There is an insanity in all of us, but this man made madness into Art, taking fragments of his life into absurd surrealism, scribbling an understanding of just how his mind works.

Memorable parts of this book:
-Insults To The Unconditioned
-Alienation And Black Magic
-Electricity Is A Body, A Weight
-So Then It Is In Prevention

Pages: 143, 201, 211

[Omar Abu Samra]

Space,
Time
Dimensions,
Becoming,
The future,
The hereafter,
Non-begin.
The self
The non-self
Are nothing to me;
But there is one thing,
Which is something,
Only one thing,
Which is something,
And I feel it,
Because it wants to
Come out:
The presence
Of my corporal
Pain,

[Michael A.]

the "apotheosis" of surrealism or psychotic ramblings? there should be no discernible difference, and in fact, there is not

[Matt Medeiros]

Unreadable. I really wanted to like this book but it was just too incoherent.