The Residues, Part One Collected Writings 1990-2020 by Stephen Barber

Author:Stephen Barber
Format: epub

Like the celebrated Pocket Books series published by City Lights, the Artaud Anthology exerts a very particular presence in its physical and tangible form. Although its dimensions are larger than those of the Pocket Book, the Artaud Anthology adapted itself to its readers as a kind of battered and mutating icon – in conversations with readers who acquired a copy in the 1960s, I’ve often heard how their attachment to it compelled them to carry the book around with them for years on end, so that it came to acquire its own, often-damaged and over-inscribed dimensions, which intimately corresponded to its reader’s preoccupations. Because the chronological and thematic order of the texts included in the Artaud Anthology is often disordered and opaque, and also because that content is largely composed of fragmentary texts of no more than a page or two, the book lent itself to multiple, individual readings: short or intensive readings, undertaken on the run, on journeys, or while engaged in creative projects. It possessed its own mobile sense and presence as a kind of infinite book, open to re-creation and reformulation with every repeated reading. City Lights published the work of a number of seminal French-language poets, both before and after the appearance of the Artaud Anthology, including works by Jacques Prévert and Henri Michaux; however, in the context of the vitally adaptable, mutable book, in intimate contact with its reader, the Artaud Anthology’s form corresponds most closely to that of a book by Jean Genet, published by City Lights in the summer of 1970 with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg: May Day Speech, which Genet had delivered earlier that year at Yale University, before an outdoor crowd of thirty thousand spectators, and in which he had instructed his audience of young students that the revolutionary culture of the then-prominent Black Panther Party superseded and should take urgent precedence for them over their own university studies. Genet’s text had been rapidly translated for the occasion by the scholar Richard Howard, and then published by City Lights with a parallel rapidity and proximity to the event’s concerns. Since Genet’s May Day Speech is only twenty-five pages long in its published form, it could be rolled or folded, carried or brandished, quoted or displayed by its reader (like any incendiary pamphlet); in a similar way to the Artaud Anthology, it worked both as a creative incitation, throughout every art form, and also in a combative sense, in relation to its readers’ conception of their position in society.

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