Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications
- Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
- Innovations
- Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
- Influence
PC: What form did words and language take in his early pieces and how did he make it written and spoken language temporary?
RM: Those were written texts in French. He is quite well known for his glossolalia, which are these made up words but he didn’t actually start using glossolalia until after his theatre writings. He always used French until the early 40s or very late 30s when he was in psychiatric hospital and he started inventing his own language. One word that really interested Artaud is ‘kaka’ which is a childish word for ‘poo’ in French. The syllable ‘ka’ comes up quite a lot in his glossolalia. It is also related to the Ancient Eqyptian figure of the Kha which is sometimes ‘ka’ but that is the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the Kha which is ‘the double’. So when he keeps using this word ‘kaka’ or ‘ka’ he is referring to this bodily process of shitting, which he loves talking about and comes up again and again in his later texts, but he is also referring to this Ancient Egyptian idea of ‘the double’ which informed his theatre writings – The Theatre and the Double – “if theatre doubles life, life doubles true theatre.” Everything has this double for him. The ‘ka’ sound is a really interesting instance of his use of language which is both meaningful and symbolic. Alan Weiss writes about this, he takes it to quite a ridiculous extent, but he says that when you say the word ‘ka’, the letter K, the Ker sound you’re putting pressure on your diaphragm which also facilitates your digestive system.
PC: It illustrates how everything is looped and connected.
RM: Yes
PC: Is Artaud’s writing untranslatable because he used French in quite a free and inventive way?
RM: I really want to avoid saying, because I think a lot of people in languages, whoever they are working on say, “Oh well, of course it is impossible to translate.” If you say that, you’re saying that it is completely inaccessible to anybody that doesn’t speak that language to a certain level. I think that Artaud’s ideas are translatable but at the same time he does use a lot of homonyms.
PC: What were the recurring homonyms?
RM: He has these returning themes of knives, holes, banging nails which crop up as images drawn in his notebooks but also as words, that when read out loud sound the same and rhyme: trou, coup, clou.
PC: His action, text and sound become one.
RM: Yes. This is all the kind of stuff that comes up in his notebooks. He would quite often hammer at the same time as he was speaking. There are some photographs of him where he is stabbing himself on the back with a pen. These are really interesting because a lot of his work was about gesturing then stabbing the page with a pen but he was also stabbing his own body; the text became like a continuation of his body.
PC: Did he draw blood and mark the page with that?
RM: No he didn’t actually draw blood. You know he’d been doing these spells and he would talk about fixing a point in his body and then he would stab himself with his pen – not actually draw blood but he would poke himself with a pen and then stab the page. He also writes about eczema and suffering from eczema and some of the texts that he made, particularly the spells, he would scrape away at the page so that the page would look like a kind of eczematic skin; the writing surface would become like an extension of his skin.
Summary
- One word that really interested Artaud is ‘kaka’ which is a childish word for ‘poo’ in French.
- The ‘ka’ sound is a really interesting instance of his use of language which is both meaningful and symbolic.
- Everything has this double for him.
- The Theatre and the Double – “if theatre doubles life, life doubles true theatre.”
- Artaud’s ideas are translatable but at the same time he does use a lot of homonyms.
- Artaud has these returning themes of knives, holes, banging nails
- The text became like a continuation of the body.
- Artaud would poke himself with a pen and then stab the page.
- Artaud would scrape away at the page so that the page would look like a kind of eczematic skin
