PARTISAN REVIEW
175
program for the abolition of art: "En finir avec les chefs-d'oeuvres" ;
art
must become the concern of the masses
(la
louie),
must be an
affair of the streets, and above all,
of
the organism, the body, of
nature. Thus, it would
move
men, would move things, for:
ceil
faut
que les chases crevent pour repartir et recommencer." The serpent
moves to the tones of the music not because of their "spiritual con–
tent" but because their vibrations communicate themselves through
the earth to the serpent's entire body. Art has cut off this com–
munication and "deprived a gesture
[un geste]
from its repercussion
in
the organism": this unity with nature must be restored: "beneath
the poetry of text, there is a poetry
tout court,
without form and
without text."
This
natural poetry must be recaptured which is still
present
in
the eternal myths of mankind (such as "beneath the text"
in Sophocles'
Oedipus)
and in the magic of the primitives: its re–
discovery is prerequisite for the liberation of man. For "we are not
free, and the sky can still fall on our head. And the theater is made
first of all in order to teach us all this.
2
To attain this goal, the theater
must leave the stage and go on the street, to the masses. And it must
shock,
cruelly shock and
shatter
the complacent consciousness and
unconscious.
. . . [a theater] where violent physical images crush and hypnotize
the sensibility of the spectator, seized in the ,theater as by a whirl–
wind of superior forces.
Even at the time when Artaud wrote, the "superior forces" were
of a very different kind, and they seized man, not
to
liberate but
rather to enslave and destroy
him
more effectively. And today, what
possible language, what possible image can crush and hypnotize
minds
and bodies which live
in
peaceful coexistence with (and even
profiting from) genocide, torture and poison? And if Artaud wants a
"constant sonorization: sounds and noises and cries, first for their
quality of vibration and then for that which they represent," we ask:
has
not the audience, even the "natural" audience on the streets,
long since become familiar with the violent noises, cries, which are
the daily equipment of the mass media, sports, highways, places
of recreation? They do not break the oppressive familiarity with
destruction; they reproduce it.
2. Antonin Artaud,
Ltl Thl8trtl
tit
son doubltl
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964),
pp.
113, 119, 121, 123, 124, 126 (written in 1933).
