How did you first become interested in the works of Artaud?

In the late 1970s I worked as a musician and, in that context, became aware of Artaud’s sound recordings, which he made in the last period of his life, in 1946-48, long after the time when he was associated with the Surrealists in the 1920s and formulated his Theatre of Cruelty ideas in the 1930s. In particular, Artaud made a recording for radio titled To have done with the judgment of god — a project of percussion, screams and incanted texts — which was banned outright by the French national radio station, shortly before Artaud’s death. I then started reading Artaud, and spent the second half of the 1980s living in Paris, where I met Artaud’s surviving friends and associates, and other figures who had been important to him.

You’ve studied the drawings of Artaud as well as his literary works. His drawings seem even more morbid than his writing at times. How do you account for his apparent obsession for putting everyone including himself in a coffin?

Blows and Bombs
BY Stephen Barber
(Creation Books, 2003)

It’s particularly in a drawing entitled The Theatre of Cruelty, undertaken while Artaud was at the asylum of Rodez in 1946, that he places a number of imaginary figures in coffins — the young women whom he imagined as his “daughters of the heart to be born,” a group of allies who would travel to Rodez to release him from the asylum, and deliver to him “a ton of heroin” — but Artaud himself isn’t in the coffin. In fact, Artaud was a great refuser of death, and was adamant in the last period of his life — when he was gravely ill with cancer and from the after-effects of the violent treatment in the asylums — that he would not die, and that death itself was a kind of malign emanation of society’s power, to be combatted by a project of anatomical transformation which would involve the autopsying of the current human body and its reinvention without organs (the idea that inspired the French theorists Deleuze and Guattari), but with the skeleton, the lungs and the face left intact. Death is always a source of fury to Artaud.

What exactly would you say Artaud was hoping to achieve in his film scenario La Coquille et le Clergyman?

This is a project from the mid-1920s, at the time when Artaud was in tension with the Surrealist movement, partly over his career as a cinema actor, which the Surrealists disapproved of — he was in numerous celebrated French films of the period, such as Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Lang’s Liliom — before deciding he was definitively finished with film in the early 1930s. Artaud wrote many film scenarios, which he intended to direct himself, though he could never raise the money; however, one of them was filmed, by the filmmaker Germaine Dulac — a film which Artaud, at least initially, detested, and whose premiere led to a riot in which the Surrealists supported him, despite their other disagreements. Buñuel, the director most closely associated with Surrealist film, saw Dulac’s film at the time when he was preparing his collaboration with Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. So, first of all, in writing his scenario, Artaud intended to incite enough interest to raise the money to make a film. But he also had an intricate theory of cinema in which the film image (which would remain silent — Artaud opposed the introduction of sound to cinema at that time) would have an engulfing and transformational impact on his spectators’ perception, and lead them to adopt a more ‘active’ position in reaction to the images they were in contact with. Artaud saw that reaction as a corporeal one.

What was it like to meet Gaston Ferdière in the flesh? What are your own opinions on him and his treatment of Artaud?

Gaston Ferdière was the director of the asylum of Rodez, where Artaud spent the years 1943-46 (he had previously been in other asylums, since 1937), and he made the decision to try a treatment of electroshock therapy on Artaud, though he didn’t apply the treatments himself and delegated them to one of his assistants. At that time, electroshock therapy was new and had an aura of innovation, and Ferdière was a young doctor who wanted to experiment. Artaud experienced the treatment (over fifty sessions in all) as agonizingly painful, and as triggering severe memory losses. Many of his final writings (in the years 1946-48, after his release from Rodez and return from Paris) are outcries against his treatment at Rodez.

I met Ferdière in 1985, when he was nearly eighty years old, and he was a poignant, isolated, maudlin figure by that time — though still combatively certain he had applied the right treatment on Artaud, and still practicing electroshock therapy even then, on children, at a private clinic in Aubervilliers, in the northern suburbs of Paris. My feelings were divided between having the chance to talk at length with him, over the years until his death in 1990, since he had had a unique life-experience and was a fascinating character in his own right. (He had been a Surrealist poet himself in the early 1930s, and his own obsessions, at the time I knew him, were with pornography, drugs and bouffant hairstyles). Everyone who knew Artaud well has now died, so, whatever merits or otherwise of my books on him, at least they draw on a primary contact with people like Ferdière. But I side with Artaud on the question of electroshock.

Is it on record anywhere what Sartre thought about Artaud?

Sartre must have had some positive feelings or sympathy for Artaud, since he contributed one of his manuscripts to the auction held at the time of Artaud’s release from Rodez, to generate funds for his living costs back in Paris. Artaud didn’t reciprocate those feelings and his friend Jacques Prevel reported (in his book of memories of his time spent walking around Paris with Artaud) that he told him he “abominated” Sartre.

I have read Hervé Guibert and in no way see how he could be a “successor” to Artaud as mentioned in your book The Screaming Body. Please comment on this assumption.

This isn’t my own assumption and I say in the book that Guibert was often viewed in France, before his death from AIDS in 1991, as a successor. So I can only guess why. Throughout the history of the reception of Artaud’s work, there have been many other labeled or self-proclaimed successors to Artaud — in the 1960s, a multitude of theatre directors worldwide made their careers by allying themselves to Artaud as his ‘successors’. The grouping of young French writers in the 1980s in the same way is probably no different. There’s no question that the writers of Guibert’s generation who are associated with Artaud — Gilles Barbedette, who also died of AIDS, and older figures such as Pierre Guyotat, who is a legendary figure in France and has several of his books published in English, is also often linked with Artaud, and again, he’s someone who has read Artaud intensively over a long period of time. The same is true of many Japanese choreographers in the 1960s. But, finally, it’s a futile idea: there is no succession to a body of work like Artaud’s (which is also unprecedented).

After so many years of reading and writing about Artaud, did you at some point feel yourself being uncomfortably drawn into his world? In a sense, did you feel you were “becoming” Artaud? Do you think he’s had any influence on the way you write in works such as Caligula?

To engage with it in the way that it merits, Artaud’s work demands an extreme level of concentration and intensive involvement. In fact, it’s impossible to sustain that kind of involvement without some kind of transformation or mutation of the kind Artaud envisaged. But I certainly never felt I was becoming Artaud or writing like him (if there’s any inspiration in my writing from another body of writing, it’s from Georges Bataille, rather than Artaud, whose work is irreplicable).

Caligula is a book from 2001 which I collaborated on with a British poet, Jeremy Reed, and explores or recreates some of the preoccupations of a number of Roman emperors. Artaud had written an aberrant, largely-invented biography of the Emperor Heliogabalus, in 1933. Part of this project I did with Jeremy was to imagine how the Roman Emperors might be written about, seventy years on, with the same sense of the visceral that Artaud had applied to them; so, in one sense, the book was inspired by one of Artaud’s books. But Jeremy and I used our own preoccupations, and for me, that book is much closer to the concerns of Bataille than Artaud.