Is it on record anywhere what Sartre thought about Artaud?

Sartre must have had some positive feelings or sympathy for Artaud, since he contributed one of his manuscripts to the auction held at the time of Artaud’s release from Rodez, to generate funds for his living costs back in Paris. Artaud didn’t reciprocate those feelings and his friend Jacques Prevel reported (in his book of memories of his time spent walking around Paris with Artaud) that he told him he “abominated” Sartre.

I have read Hervé Guibert and in no way see how he could be a “successor” to Artaud as mentioned in your book The Screaming Body. Please comment on this assumption.

This isn’t my own assumption and I say in the book that Guibert was often viewed in France, before his death from AIDS in 1991, as a successor. So I can only guess why. Throughout the history of the reception of Artaud’s work, there have been many other labeled or self-proclaimed successors to Artaud — in the 1960s, a multitude of theatre directors worldwide made their careers by allying themselves to Artaud as his ‘successors’. The grouping of young French writers in the 1980s in the same way is probably no different. There’s no question that the writers of Guibert’s generation who are associated with Artaud — Gilles Barbedette, who also died of AIDS, and older figures such as Pierre Guyotat, who is a legendary figure in France and has several of his books published in English, is also often linked with Artaud, and again, he’s someone who has read Artaud intensively over a long period of time. The same is true of many Japanese choreographers in the 1960s. But, finally, it’s a futile idea: there is no succession to a body of work like Artaud’s (which is also unprecedented).

After so many years of reading and writing about Artaud, did you at some point feel yourself being uncomfortably drawn into his world? In a sense, did you feel you were “becoming” Artaud? Do you think he’s had any influence on the way you write in works such as Caligula?

To engage with it in the way that it merits, Artaud’s work demands an extreme level of concentration and intensive involvement. In fact, it’s impossible to sustain that kind of involvement without some kind of transformation or mutation of the kind Artaud envisaged. But I certainly never felt I was becoming Artaud or writing like him (if there’s any inspiration in my writing from another body of writing, it’s from Georges Bataille, rather than Artaud, whose work is irreplicable).

Caligula is a book from 2001 which I collaborated on with a British poet, Jeremy Reed, and explores or recreates some of the preoccupations of a number of Roman emperors. Artaud had written an aberrant, largely-invented biography of the Emperor Heliogabalus, in 1933. Part of this project I did with Jeremy was to imagine how the Roman Emperors might be written about, seventy years on, with the same sense of the visceral that Artaud had applied to them; so, in one sense, the book was inspired by one of Artaud’s books. But Jeremy and I used our own preoccupations, and for me, that book is much closer to the concerns of Bataille than Artaud.