Artaud’s Surgical Theatre: War, Medicine, and Regeneration

Abstract

In 1916, as the adolescent Antonin Artaud was treated for “war neurosis” in a military hospital, he witnessed the birth of modern plastic surgery. These procedures, which rearranged injured bodies in new constellations of flesh and bone, helped to inspire Artaud’s first theatrical foray. “The spectator,” he writes in 1926, “will go to the theater the way he goes to the surgeon.” I argue that literal surgical practice is crucial to Artaud’s surgical metaphors. Plastic surgery revealed to Artaud the body’s plasticity: its capacity to morph, regrow, and heal. While the physical culture movement in interwar France promoted militarized and medicalized models of the body, Artaud used surgical motifs in his plays, poems, and films to explore how physical and mental habits might be dissevered and how they might regenerate. Although Artaud ultimately considered his attempts at theatrical surgery to have failed, I conclude by looking at current applied theatre work with US military veterans, which has been shown to transform participants’ neural networks – performing, as Artaud would put it, a kind of “brain surgery.”