What is the Artaudian doctrine of the Theatre of Cruelty, as it pertains to literature and the theatre, as well as to everyday existence?

Artaud’s ideas about the Theatre of Cruelty were created in the form of fragments, letters, manifestoes, abandoned and unrealized projects. I think they’re not a doctrine, and in many ways they’re the antithesis of a doctrine, since they’re contradictory, mutable, transformational, and concerned with the confrontation of corporeal space and performance space. Artaud was an adamant opponent of all forms of representation, repetition, and diffusion. It’s close to impossible to distill or summarize his work without banalizing it, and it’s much better to seize the chance to encourage readers to read his performance-manifestoes for themselves. As with his project for Surrealist cinema, his Theatre of Cruelty is a project which aims for an all-engulfing transformation of the spectators’ perceptual, ocular and physical capacities. In that sense, it’s something which necessarily impacts on everyday existence, but not on literature, unless literature were redefined so that Artaud were the seminal figure driving the entire existence of literature.

Why was Artaud was so obsessed with the body, especially the body in torment? Why is there such an assault on the mind and exclusive preference given to the body as the ultimate expression of creativity in his books?

For Artaud, the body is all there is, and his preoccupation is with always giving pre-eminence to the body — which he sees as the raw material for his projects of refiguring life, death, society, perception…

For Artaud, the body is all there is, and his preoccupation is with always giving pre-eminence to the body — which he sees as the raw material for his projects of refiguring life, death, society, perception — rather than constructing a body/mind or body/spirit dialogue, as many writers have. Artaud attempts to expunge everything that is not the body, and then to make what remains of the body dense, vital and gestural. The body isn’t necessarily in torment in his work, though he emphasizes that the signs or gestures made by the body under pressure or in turmoil are those that best resist the processes of representation.

As for why he is so obsessed with the body, he seems to have decided, early in his work, that nothing else merited becoming obsessed with. But his body also certainly impacted upon his perception in very direct and painful ways at many points in his life, during his electroshock sessions and in the final period when he was ill with intestinal cancer, for example, and those moments only exacerbate the urgency with which he projects that corporeal obsession.

The Existentialists, who took over all artistic and intellectual circles in Paris after World War II, seemingly did not want anything to do with Artaud. This is strange perhaps, because Artaud more than anyone of his epoch confronted his anguish and did not back down from the burden of becoming a true self. Can you explain this apparent rejection?

I think the Existentialists didn’t reject Artaud, though his association with the history of Surrealism (twenty years before the period when Artaud inhabited the same cafés in Paris that the Existentialists did, in 1946-48) placed him, involuntarily, within an intricate set of quarrels between literary and philosophical movements.

As mentioned, Sartre made a sympathetic gesture towards Artaud in donating a manuscript to be sold for his benefit, and Albert Camus, who edited the newspaper Combat for part of the time between Artaud’s release from Rodez in 1946 and death in 1948, published extracts on at least two occasions from Artaud’s writings. The hostility actually emanates from Artaud’s side. Artaud rarely liked other writers or artists, and barely tolerated the audience of his own work. As he told Jacques Prevel: “When I hear someone talking about a new poet, I want to shoot him at pointblank range.”