Resisting the plague: The French reactionary right and Artaud's theater of cruelty

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 64, Issue PART 1, 2003, Pages 71-95

  Spreen, Constance ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 60950722109     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-64-1-71     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Citations of Artaud's Complete Works appear parenthetically and include volume and page numbers. Citations of volumes 1-9 refer to Œuvres complètes: Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, 9 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, vol. 1, 1976
2. vol. 4, 1978
3. vol. 5, 1979
4. vol. 7, 1982)
5. citations of volume 10 refer to Œuvres complètes, 26 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, vol. 10, 1974)
6. English quotations of The Theater and Its Double are taken from Mary Caroline Richards's translation (New York: Grove, 1958). All other translations are my own
7. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 284
8. See Bettina L. Knapp, Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision (New York: Lewis 1969), 125
9. and Alain Virmaux and Odette Virmaux, Antonin Artaud: Un bilan critique (Paris: Belfond, 1979), 36-37
10. See also the editor's notes in Complete Works, 5:247-50
11. See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-51
12. Colette Capitan Peter, Charles Mourras et l'idéologie d'Action Française (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 27
13. According to Ivan P. Barko, Maurras had been a forceful advocate of impressionistic, subjective criticism prior to 1893, claiming that "the talent of a critic lies entirely in his sensitivity" (L'ésthé tique littéraire de Charles Maurras [Geneva: Droz, 1961], 52)
14. His sensibilities led him at first to embrace the Romantic and post-Romantic writers. Barko contends that Maurras, in ultimately repudiating them, was in fact rejecting an aesthetic by which he was himself tempted. An incessant need to triumph over his own inclinations may account for the violence of his language (see "L'art poétique maurrassien: La campagne antiromantique [1894-1900]," in Barko, 87-142)
15. For more on Maurras and the Action Française see Eugen Weber Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962)
16. Charles Maurras, "Prologue to an Essay on Criticism" (in French), in Œuvres capitales, vol. 3 (Paris: Flammarion, 1954), 24-25
17. Lucien Dubech, The Theater, 1918-1923 (in French) (Paris: Plon, 1925) 111, 116, 187
18. Gérard Hupin, Un grand défenseur de la civilisation: Charles Mourras (Brussels: Editions Universitaires, 1956), 38
19. Charles Maurras, Gazette de France, 7 January 1895, quoted in Barko, 88
20. See Sander L. Gilman, "Depicting Disease: A Theory of Representing Illness," in Disease and Representation: The Construction of Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1-6
21. Lucien Dubech, The Crisis of the Theater (in French) (Paris: Librairie de France, 1928), 70
22. André Villeneuve, "Le théâtre de la cruauté," L'action française, 14 October 1932
23. See Marcel Thomas, "Le cas Valéry," in Les écrivains et l'affaire Dreyfus: Actes du colloque organisé par le Centre Charles Péguy et l'Université d'Orléans (19-31 Oct. 1981), ed. Géraldi Leroy (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983) 104-5
24. Pierre Hebey, ed., L'esprit NRF, 1908-1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), xvi
25. Alvin Eustis, Marcel Arland, Benjamin Crémieux, Ramon Fernandez: Trois critiques de la "Nouvelle revue française" (Paris: Debresse, 1961), 17
26. Paradoxically, Artaud's concern over the criticism of his essay in L'action française may be explicable in part by an undeclared identification with the movement it served. The opening line of an unfinished letter dated 14 February 1931 and addressed to Georges Calzant, head of the student branch of the Action Française and the Camelots du Roi, states that "I have been since last June a member of the A.F. league" (7:344). Admittedly, it is difficult to take this brief statement at face value particularly in light of the lack of references to the Action Française elsewhere in Artaud's writings of the early 1930s. In 1943, however, Artaud declared that he had always been "a royalist and patriot" ( 10:104) and that he had been aided in 1937 by Breton and the Action Française who he said had come to deliver him from the asylum at Le Havre (10:145). It is notable that Artaud resolved in a hallucination the painful rejection he had earlier experienced at the hands of both Breton and the Action Française. This imagined rescue further suggests that he identified with the Action Française on some level. His concern may also have had to do with the caliber of its paper's readers, many of whom did not subscribe to the movement's ideology but did appreciate the paper's provocative style and its reputation as a "school of good taste" (Peter, 127). It was, in other words, a paper to reckon with. Proust, an avowed reader of L'action française received from it his daily "mental high-altitude treatment." His justification for reading an anti-Dreyfusard (anti-Semitic) paper was the critical acumen of its editor, Léon Daudet: "No longer able to read more than a single newspaper, in place of those of the past I read L'action française. I can say that this choice is not without merit. The thought of what a man could suffer having once made me a Dreyfusard, one can imagine that reading a 'rag' infinitely more cruel than the Figaro and the Débats, with which I had formerly contented myself, often gives me something like the first symptoms of heart disease. But in what other journal is the portico decorated by Saint-Simon himself, I mean by Léon Daudet?" (Contre Saint-Beuve [Paris: Gallimard, 1954], 439-40)
27. Benjamin Crémieux, "Directors: Louis Jouvet" (in French), Je suis partout, 12 September 1931, 2
28. Arthur Simon, Gaston Baty, théoricien du théâtre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972), 64
29. See Benjamin Crémieux, "Saint Thomas versus Racine; or Antihumanism in the Theater" (in French), Les nouvelles littéraires 9 October 1926, 4
30. Gaston Baty, "Sire le mot," Les lettres 11 (1921): 679-711
31. See Pierre Birnbaum, "Hermaphroditism and Sexual Perversion," in Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Léon Blum to the Present, trans. Miriam Kochan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 162-65
32. See "That One's a Jew" (in French), NRF, no. 250 (1935): 100-108
33. Jeffrey Mehlman, "Literature and Collaboration: Benoist- Méchin's Return to Proust," MLN 98 (1983): 979-80
34. Jean Schlumberger, "Le théâtre," NRF, no. 50 (1913): 305
35. quoted in Sylvia Caides Vagianos, Paul Claudel and "La Nouvelle RevueFrançaise"(1909-1918) (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 118
36. See Léon Daudet, Ecrivains et artistes (Paris: Capitole, 1929), 51
37. Artaud's Cenci appears in Complete Works, 4:147-210
38. Ernst Nolle also briefly discusses the condemnation in Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), 76-77
39. Lucien Dubech, "Les Cenci: Aux Folies-Wagram," Candide, 23 May 1935
40. Press reviews of The Cenci, though largely negative, were not uniformly so. Colette, despite certain reservations, recognized the play's innovative qualities. For a discussion of reactions in the press see Virmaux and Virmaux 33-40
41. Robert Brasillach [pseud. Interim], "Chronicle of Theaters: I. The Cenci" (in French), L'action française, 17 May 1935
42. Although Brasillach's notion of a poetry of bad taste in some ways resembles kitsch, it is necessary to distinguish between the two. Kitsch refers to the popularization and, especially, the commercialized fabrication of objects and works of art that once belonged to and signified an elite social class. It suggests therefore a slippage "downward" from "high" to "low" art, from authenticity and uniqueness to reproducibility and "aesthetic inadequacy" (Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987], 236). Brasillach, on the contrary, is speaking of an "upward" movement from the vulgar to the poetic, of the recuperation of bad taste by a social elite
43. Quoted in Stephen Eric Bronner and D. Emily Hicks, "Expressionist Painting and the Aesthetic Dimension," in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin, 1983), 242
44. See Œuvres complètes de Robert Brasillach, 12 vols. (Paris: Club de l'Honnête Homme, 1964), 10:285
45. Fernand Tourret, for instance, appraised Artaud's interpretation of his character in Jacinto Gran's play Monsieur de Pygmalion as that of a "melodramatic villain, brushing against the scenery, simian, sly ignoble" (quoted in Ronald Hayman, Artaud and After [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 46)
46. Lucien Dubech, "La chronique des théâtres," L'action française, 24 May 1935
47. In his Lettre à un soldat de la classe 60, written during his imprisonment in 1944 and only three months prior to his execution for collaboration, Brasillach describes the evolution of his feelings toward the German people: from distrust, to curiosity over their "poetry," to reasoned collaboration, and, finally, to a love affair, though one that had ended, the couple parting ways with sweet memories and some regret (see his Œuvres complètes, 5:589-609)
48. Critics have debated the nature of Brasillach's aesthetics and its relation to his politics. While Gérard Sthème de Jubécourt underscores the young writer's devotion to literature, Peter D. Tame describes him as much more a man of the theater than Jubécourt would like to admit arguing that Brasillach's attraction to the theater underpinned his fascination with National Socialism (Jubécourt, Robert Brasillach, critique littéraire [Lausanne: Amis de Robert Brasillach, 1972], 194
49. Tame, La mystique du fascisme dans l'œuvre de Robert Brasillach [Paris: Latines, 1986], 117-22)
50. More recently, David Carroll has made a convincing case for Brasillach's "literary fascism," claiming that the aesthetic principles behind his literary criticism (among them unity and order) also undergirded his politics ("Fascism As Aesthetic Experience," in French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995], 99-124)
51. Focusing on his literary production, Alice Kaplan argues that the naīveté and sentimentality that mar Brasillach's novelistic writing emerge in his political writings. Questioning the sincerity of his naīveté, Kaplan further attributes to him a witting evacuation of politics and economics from his representations of fascism as a means of propagating it through entertainment ("The Making of a Fascist Writer," in The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 1-27, esp. 13 - 14)
52. Robert Brasillach, TheSeven Colors (in French), in Œuvres complètes, 2:428