“‘The Catastrophes of Heaven’: Modernism, Primitivism, and the Madness of Antonin Artaud,” in Modernism / Modernity, Vol. 3, No. 2, May, 1996, pp. 73-91.

In the following essay, Sass presents a case history of Artaud as artist, primitivist, and madman, arguing that neither Artaud's art nor his madness led him out of the “malaise of modern existence,” characterized by the conflict between consciousness and instinctual being, but deeper into it.

To heal the catastrophes of heaven, Voyage to the land of speaking blood.¹

I.

These words, with their suggestion of a hoped-for remedy for world catastrophe, are those of the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the exemplary madman of the modernist avant-garde. They were written in 1935, shortly before Artaud embarked on his own quest for the primitive, a journey to visit the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. Artaud was, by then, thoroughly disgusted with modern civilization and profoundly disillusioned about the possibility...