Godot

Godot

  • Submitted By: pulinbhuyan
  • Date Submitted: 10/23/2013 11:14 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 2256
  • Page: 10
  • Views: 65

Antoine Marie Josef Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud, was born Sept 4, 1896 in Paris. I feel that it is it is important to briefly take into account his life events and issues in order to better understand the man who called for a Theatre of Cruelty to wake up and heal the decaying society of his day. At the age of 4, Artaud suffered a severe attack of meningitis which made him a sickly and nervous child. As a teenager, he suffered severe bouts of depression and was allegedly stabbed in the back one day by a pimp while walking through the
streets of Paris – this experience of a random act of violence that must have shaken the young Artaud to the core and perhaps had a lasting influence on his perception of life and reality. During his late teens and early twenties his behaviour became so erratic and disruptive that his parents sent him for prolonged stays to a Sanatorium. During these periods Artaud began to read Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Poe and began to use drawing as an outlet for his troubled emotional and mental states. In 1919 he was prescribed opium which led to a life-long addiction. He suffered from mental illness his entire life and was in and out of hospitals and asylums in an attempt to get his demons under control. From 1937-1946 shortly after The Theatre and its Double was written, Artaud was committed to a psychiatric hospital. He underwent electroshock treatments, coma inducing insulin and was eventually diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia. He spent his final years in an asylum where he died in 1948.

In 1920, at the age of 24, Artaud moved to Paris to become a writer but fell in with theatre types and began a career as an actor. The Surrealist movement was at its height and in 1925 he became involved in this circle, first writing articles for the Surrealist Revolution and running the Bureau of Surrealist Research (surrealists were known for exploring automatic writing, recording dreams and engaging in any act and art form that...

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