The Peyote Dance

Text: English, French (translation)

History

Artaud, Antonin

Americas

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Messianic madman, founder of the Theater of Cruelty (a limiting misnomer), Antonin Artaud's most immediate impact was on Genet, Brecht, Beckett etc. But he continually searched for a suprareality far older & larger than the state of "conscious chaos" & triviality he saw in modern times. In this small book, based on a journey in the mountains of Mexico to an inaccessible tribe who "live as...if they were already dead," & thru the peyote rite they practiced, he found many of the transcendent concepts he had earlier articulated--the Great Ancient Myths he here relates to Plato, the "no God" but Male & Female principles in Nature (which he certainly, castrated man that he was, never found in life), even if later at the end of his peyote transfiguration there will be mention of both the doctrine of Grace & Jesus-Christ-Peyote. He wrote much of this, with additional later comments, in the various Maisons de Sante where he spent his last years. He had always been deranged, & prefiguring Laing, he commented earlier in The Theater & Its Double, "everything that disturbs the mind without causing it to lose its equilibrium is a moving means of expressing the innate pulsations of life." & those innate pulsations--expressed, for example, thru motion & sound, by "act & perpetual emanation"--were his essential contribution. Here on the via dolorosa, further heightened by peyote, there were also the emblems ("trefoils, spears, crosses") of the penitential ritual & symbolism so much a part of this demon-ridden, metaphysical genius "guided by the Invisible" toward an early death. A small but significant addition to the canon & the claque.--Kirkus

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

THE THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE, ANTONIN ARTAUD, 1958 EDITION

Theater and Its Double, The

GROVE PRESS

A revolutionary figure in the literary avant-garde of his time, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is now seen to be central to the development of post-modernism. His writings comprise verse, prose poems, film scenarios, a historical novel, plays, essays on film, theater, art, and literature, and many letters. Susan Sontag's selection conveys the genius of this singular writer.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

University of California Press

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Antonin Artaud : Collected Works (Volume 1)

Riverrun Pr

Artaud

Calder Publications Ltd

Antonin Artaud : Collected Works (Volume 2)

Antonin Artaud : Collected Works (Volume 4)

Antonin Artaud : Collected Works (Volume 3)

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Books by Artaud, Antonin