Overview
Antonin Artaud's 1937 apocalyptic journey to Ireland and his writings from
that journey form an extraordinary moment of accumulating disintegration and
tenacious creativity in his work. After publishing a manifesto prophecy about
the catastrophic immediate-future entitled The New Revelations of Being, Artaud abruptly
left Paris and travelled to Ireland, remaining there for six weeks and existing
without money, travelling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off
Ireland's western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, where he was
arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported
back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in lunatic asylums,
including the entire span of the Second World War. During that journey to
Ireland - on which he accumulated signs of his forthcoming apocalypse, and
planned his own role in it as 'THE REVEALED ONE' - Artaud wrote letters to
friends in Paris and also created several magic spells, intended to curse his
enemies and to protect his friends from Paris's forthcoming incineration and
the Antichrist's appearance at the Deux Magots cafe. To André Breton, he wrote:
'It's the Unbelievable - yes, the
Unbelievable - it's the Unbelievable which is the truth.' Many of his writings
from Ireland were lost, and this book collects all of his surviving letters,
drawn together from archives and private collections, together with photographs
of the locations he travelled through. This edition, with an afterword and
notes by the book's translator/editor, Stephen Barber, marks the seventieth
anniversary of Artaud's death.
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About the Author
Antonin Artaud's work has a world-renowned status for experimentation across performance, film, sound, poetry and visual art. In the 1920s, he was a member of the Surrealist movement until his expulsion, and formulated theoretical plans across the first half of the 1930s for his 'Theatre of Cruelty' and attempted to carry them through. He made a living as a film actor from 1924 to 1935 and made many attempts to direct his own film projects. In 1936, he travelled to Mexico with a plan to take peyote in the Tarahumara lands. In 1937, preoccupied with the imminent apocalypse, he travelled to Ireland but was deported, beginning a nine-year asylum incarceration during which he continued to write and also made many drawings. After his release in 1946, he lived in the grounds of a sanatorium in Ivry-sur-Seine, close to Paris, and worked intensively on drawings, writings and sound-recordings. He died on 4 March 1948. His drawings have been exhibited on several occasions, notably at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna in 2002 and at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 2006.
About the editor
Stephen Barber’s books have been acclaimed as ‘brilliant, profound and provocative’ by The Times newspaper in the UK, and he has been called ‘a writer of real distinction’ and ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’ by The Independent newspaper. The Sunday Times newspaper hailed his books as ‘exhilarating and disquieting’.
He is the author of many fiction and non-fiction books, including studies of Antonin Artaud, Pierre Guyotat, Jean Genet and Eadweard Muybridge. Among his recent books are England’s Darkness (Sun Vision Press) and Berlin Bodies (Reaktion Books). He has also collaborated on books with the poet Jeremy Reed and the photographer Xavier Ribas. His books have been translated into many languages and have won numerous prizes and awards. He is currently a professor of art and film at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London.