Summary
Antonin Artaud: Letters from the Madhouse
In February 1943, after several mental asylums, Artaud was transferred to the Free Zone, in Rodez, from where he sends letters to his friends from the pre-war years in which he talks about the evil forces he is fighting, about the demons and wizards who bewitch him, about the miraculous staff of St. Patrick, the source of his strength, which was stolen from him, about the phantasms of the paranoid syndrome that he is besieged and because of which he is in the asylum in Rodez.
Before he leaves the asylum in Rodez, in the last letters he sends to his friends, Artaud will list the miseries that a mentally ill person usually goes through in French asylums, and the injustice done to him personally. He will magisterially extend his complaints to the conditions of human destiny in general, to the general banality of the world in which we live, in which there is less and less room for the miraculous, for poetry and for the artist.
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