Conclusion

Abstract

Anaïs Nin writes, meeting Artaud in 1933: ‘he was a knot of tangled nerves vibrating in all directions without a core of peace’.¹ This reads as much like a description of his work as of the man himself: shattered, fragmentary and full of nervous energy. How do we reach a conclusion when writing about a body of work that by its very nature resists finality or resolve, a work that itself ended with the words ‘etc etc’? It is certainly not by writing ‘with’ Artaud, as Roland Barthes suggests, that any kind of conclusion can be advanced. Yet my conclusion lies at the heart of this incompletion. By resisting completion Artaud’s work draws attention to the processes through which it comes into being, without ever arriving at what it aims to become, because this arrival in itself would constitute the end of the work and the creation of a ‘work’ rather than a series of fragments. Essential to the fragmentary nature of the work is its very materiality, which constitutes a continual merging of signs, corporeal matter and material and textual practice. The relationship between the body and the work is, I have argued, essentially mimetic: the work mimics the body by behaving like it, but also by materially coming into contact with it, and this merging of body and work creates a new expression of corporeal experience that might, I have suggested, itself be called a ‘body’.