“Representation and De-realization: Artaud, Genet, and Sartre,” in Antonin Artaud and the Modern Theater, edited by Gene A. Plunka, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994, pp. 170-82.

In the following essay, Akstens argues that there is a similar attempt in the work of Artaud and Jean Genet to “de-realize” accepted images and definitions of reality.

This paper concerns two writers who have been highly mythologized: Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet. There is an idea of Artaud; there is an idea of Genet. It is profoundly ironic that Artaud, who complained bitterly of “a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation,”¹ has himself often been treated as an abstraction of his “theories” and his supposed persona in a manner that seems quite divorced from any actual text.² This may be a fate common to the writers of manifestos—the same might be...