Antonin Artaud's Alternate Genealogies: Self-Portraits and Family Romances

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Developed from a doctoral dissertation, this book examines the elements
of Antonin Artaud’s imaginary self, as well as his imaginary family
(including six fictional daughters). In the process, it sheds
considerable light on Artaud as a writer and theorist of biography. At
various stages, Artaud wrote biographies of Vincent Van Gogh, Abélard,
and Paolo Uccello, among others. Stout carefully reviews Artaud’s
sources and explains the reasons for his choice of subjects, pointing
out Artaud’s discovery that strange narratives “can tell the secrets
of one’s life better than a literal recounting of one’s past in
chronological order.”

Stout draws upon Freud and Derrida in formulating an analysis of
Artaud’s fictional rewriting of his own and others’ lives. In his
conclusion, Stout argues that Artaud saw the writing of biography as a
means of blurring distinctions between the writing subject and the
subject of the writing. Thus the story of Artaud becomes “a sort of
macro-text” that fictionalizes a real life. Artaud’s project was one
of “self-reinvention in the face of a continual dissolution of
identity.”

This book fills a void in the field of Artaud studies.