Customer Reviews

Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs

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Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (Faber and Faber, 1993)

When I grew up, I wanted to be Antonin Artaud. I first discovered his early poetry in Michael Benedikt's must-own anthology The Poetry of Surrealism early on in my high school career, discovering his late work and film work in college. Artaud's expressive, antagonist writing style captured me from the beginning, and the surface details of the tortured artist were immensely appealing. It is only now (I'd flirted with this book for some time, but didn't get round to picking it up until after seeing it receive the greatest acclain Clay Eshleman could give it-- he used it as a reference in the introduction to the English-language version of Artaud's Watchfiends and Rack Screams a few years later) that I get the full story. I still want to be Antonin Artaud when I grow up, but there are some pieces of his life I'd rather avoid, if possible.

Barber's biography, weighing in at less than two hundred pages, is like to be looked on by some folks as spare-- after all, we live in an age where some folks get biographies that are longer than L. Ron Hubbard's never-ending Mission Earth. And to some minor extent, those folks do have a point; there are some odd omissions here (Barber never even glosses over, for example, the commonly-levelled charge that Artaud was "abandoned" at Ville-Evrard, and the privations which followed-- not even to say "these allegations cannot be confirmed or denied," or to refer to the sources of those allegations in Artaud's own work). That said, the amount of space given seems otherwise just enough.

Barber is presenting a "just the facts, ma'am"-style biography here, with only as much cultural context as is necessary to explain Artaud's actions every now and again. Because of this, the reader familiar with the actions and lives of the main characters of the surrealist movement, especially Andre Breton, are likely to be able to mentally fill in some gaps that others will probably notice. Having been relatively immersed in the life and culture of the surrealists for two decades, it's hard for me to look at this and see it as someone who'd only heard the name and seen, maybe, a few of the paintings would approach it. I do think, however, that Barber's sparse prose style will make for a readable, if somewhat dry, biography even for those without much experience of the life and times of its subject before they pick it up.

Not something I'm now aching to have go into my permanent collection, but I'll likely pick it up again at some point. Antonin Artaud's life is a stunning mass of contradictions, and they're well-presented by Barber; a good book about a great artist. *** ½

After reading this my first thought was: "Well, maybe some day they really will come out with a definitive biography of Artaud."
Antonin Artaud, the enigmatic and crazed King of Modern Poetry, is ripe for a huge biography detailing his childhood, the intricacies of his tremendous psychological difficulties, his revolutionary approach to theatre, etc. Maybe Barber does his best with the nearly incomprehensible subject he chose--blurbs about his drug use, his migraine filled childhood, and the standard boring crap about his disagreements with and eventual expulsion from the surrealist movement. The analysis of his 'poetry' is pedestrian, nothing special. I gave it three stars because there are some amusing stories and hitherto untold tales about Artaud's bizarre exploits toward the end of his life. All in all, though, a disappointment.