Antonin Artaud's Notebooks, 1946-48: Amalgams of Text and Image

Antonin Artaud is one of the foremost and most influential figures in twentieth century culture; his work has been inspirational worldwide in the areas of literature, theatre, dance, filmmaking and digital art. Artaud worked with the French Surrealist movement in the 1920s, founded the legendary 'Theatre of Cruelty' in the 1930s, and undertook a series of cross disciplinary projects in art, performance and writing in the years before his death in 1948. During that final period, Artaud used a series of over two hundred notebooks as the raw material and launching point for those interdisciplinary projects. The content of the notebooks comprises an extraordinary amalgam of densely inscribed text and image, in the form of enmeshed notes and drawings. Although they form a vital element of Artaud's work and are pivotal in developing a complete understanding of it, these notebooks are little-known, in large part because of their 'virtual' status (held in a private collection, before undergoing a lengthy period of cataloguing) in the decades since Artaud's death; the notebooks have now become available for the first time for open consultation.

The aim of the project is to produce a monograph on the subject of these notebooks and their status; work on that monograph is at an advanced stage, since I was able to view the notebooks, in less than ideal and improvised conditions, during the period when they still formed part of a private collection. My intention is to conduct a study of the documents, in their present archival context, at the beginning of my period of leave, and then a final checking of the documents at the conclusion of the entire research project. The primary objective of the project is to develop an authoritative account of the notebooks, and to present an assessment of their status, especially in relation to the other elements of Artaud's work. My intention here is to allow readers to have a more profound understanding of the interrelated elements of Artaud's work. Although particular aspects of that work are well-known, the notebooks reveal aspects of Artaud's working practices which will alter and question that existing understanding. A further objective of the paragraph is to reflect on the likely future of the notebooks, and on the process of digitiation which they will undergo in the coming years. Since the notebooks form intricate visual 'objects' (the pages often torn and damaged by gestures undertaken at speed), they raise particular questions as to the ways in which multi-layered documents, holding corporeal traces as well as complex arrangements of text and image, may adequately be represented and disseminated in a web-based medium. It may be that new formats and new media of digital dissemination must be developed in order to 'represent' such objects satisfactorily to their audiences. The project's own medium will be that of a monograph, and a further objective of the project will be to interrogate the extent to which the form of the book itself, as a 'definitive' repository of knowledge, may hold the traces of work which is defined by its immediacy, gestural energy, and elusiveness, as well as by that work's resistance to the processes of representation.

The project is intended to be of value to a wide range of scholars, students and general readers engaged both with Artaud's work and with the media of literature, performance, visual arts and digital cultures. It will present new, primary-source research which will offer insights, and challenge preconceptions about its subject matter. It aims to generate the impetus for original and exploratory research, of an interdisciplinary nature, in the future. The project is also intended as a contribution to the development of new means of disseminating research documents and of redefining archival environments, and aims to form a probing exploration of some of the pivotal issues and dilemmas which remain to be confronted in that area.