50 Drawings to Murder Magic (The French List) Paperback – February 15, 2016 by Antonin Artaud (Author), Évelyne Grossman (Editor, Preface), Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translator) (Seagull Books)

This volume is a moving and challenging compilation of drawings executed (irony intended) between 1946 to 1948 in elementary school exercise books. The selection of drawings was done by Artaud for a publication planned by Loeb Gallery in Paris, and the poet wrote a text (his last) to accompany it. Artaud died before the project could be brought to fruition. The design of this book is wonderful: the cover accurately reproduces the blue of the student notebooks of the time along with its cloyingly sentimental drawing of fields and haystacks, and on the verso tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We also see the smudges, tears, stains that will be mirrored on the yellowing, blue-gridded pages within. What strikes us is the utter poverty of the poet forced to use such humble media for his writings and designs. We witness his meat machine--even then secretly sapped and undermined by cancer--as the vision trembles through the muted explosions of chemical-induced electricity to cause the muscles to expand and contract with varying degrees of delicacy. We see the piercing of the page--stabbed 11--perhaps 12 times--in ecstacy, frustration, or as part of a private "gris-gris" ritual--by the poet, who includes nails, thorns, and other emblems of ritualistic transfixions in his cruel drawings. The drawings themselves give us glimpses of the poet's [...], of his thyroid, of lung-like sacks collapsed upon a scream; of bodies dissected and exploded and simplified to maps of layered graphite, and of electrical armature-like processes connected by sinister, exfoliating wires. There is also a heroic landscape of words written, smeared, struck through, that encase the drawings.