When Antonin Artaud died of cancer in 1948 at the age of fifty-one, he was a marginal figure in the French artistic world. A minor motion-picture actor and founder of two short-lived avant-garde theater companies, Artaud was scarcely known as a writer other than to those familiar with the Surrealist movement. Since his death he has become one of the cultural legends of the twentieth century and is remembered for having changed the course of Western theater. His greatest significance, however, lies in the displacement effected by his poetic writing of commonly held ideas about literature. All his literary production, and especially his late writing, severely disrupts the limits of the modernist artistic and conceptual tradition.

The significance of Artaud's writings was long largely unrecognized, mostly because his name has been entangled with the clichés of literary madman and poète maudit (accursed poet). Ill-informed opinion...